


Our Truth Beneath the Lies

by AmethystAmore



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempted Murder, Berserker Thor (Marvel), Canon Divergence - Thor (2011), Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hela is her own warning, M/M, Odin (Marvel)'s A+ Parenting, Sibling Incest, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-08-21 09:32:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 41,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16574042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmethystAmore/pseuds/AmethystAmore
Summary: Loki Prince of Asgard has always known the day would come when he would be crowned King. If there is any benefit to inheriting the throne, it’s gaining access to knowledge that the All-Father has kept hidden for the good of the realm.But one must always be careful, for the truth comes at a price. There are secrets in the house of Odin. Terrible and dark, alluded to the prince only through legends and dreams. It so happens that one such secret lies hidden deep beneath Asgard’s dungeons. And what Loki discovers down there will unravel his entire world, changing his life. Forever.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This work was done for the 2018 Thorki Big Bang, and it has been a labor of love from start to finish. It is the first fanfic I've written in 5 years and the very first time I've written for this pairing. This story happened during a very difficult year for me. It was a source of comfort and healing while I attempted to navigate turbulent, emotional circumstances, and thus will always hold a special place in my heart.
> 
> I would like to thank the Thorki BB mods for the incredible effort they've put into making this event happen. You guys were very helpful and encouraging to all the content creators who participated! And I was very excited to work with la-tripleta whose beautiful art has captured perfectly the mood and atmosphere of this story. I look forward to linking those soon!
> 
> And I would also love to thank my absolutely wonderful beta, Cuquas, for the all the editing and critics she gave to me throughout this process. This fic would never have been the same without her efforts, and her support motivated me to keep going when I would start to second guess myself.
> 
> Since this fic is over 41k, I will be posting a chapter a day until it's finished so please stay tuned! I hope you enjoy "Our Truth Beneath the Lies" as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you!

***

In the dark of a moonless night, not all of Asgard sleeps. In the forgotten corners of the realm eternal, there are those still stirring. 

In taverns with ale spilling over the rims of mugs being flailed around by drunkards and bar maidens with their ample bosoms spilling over their less than modest apparel. In homes where sleepless wives fret over the fates of their husbands sent off to face Asgard's many foes in glorious battle, long since accepting that they shall wait an eternity. In the streets and alleys, hidden as one hides a blemish, huddle the poor and wretched of Asgard's people, most of whom shall perish from the cold of an especially vicious winter.

Then there is the palace of the royal family with all of its magnificent towering statues, billowing regal tapestries, and glimmering golden slopes. Its majestic presence is new, but it boasts of ancient might and power. Amidst the vast universe a true marvel to behold, symbolic of the power of Odin King. But illusions so pretty as this always hide the true ugliness of how it came into being.

And it is high time the All-Father be reminded of that fact.

Out of this dark night, a figure cloaked in black and green and wreathed with horns more impressive than a stag’s antlers emerges from a portal of questionable origin. She enters the palace under the cover of darkness, but makes no effort to hide. She wants to be seen. Her silhouette catches the torch light, casting eerie shadows that seem to almost take on a sinister sort of life of their own. They snuff out the flames as they pass with swift gusts that linger no longer than seconds, yet their howls echo around the courtyard in muted cries that sound much like mourning children.

She takes the stairs in twos and threes, pace increasing as she draws nearer to the imposing doors leading into the golden hall. There are guards posted outside, and one of the many bumbling imbeciles carrying the title of “Royal Advisor” scurries to halt her approach. 

“Y-Your Highness, the King has forbidden your pres–”

A flick of her hand summons a spear through the fool’s neck. He falls dead at her feet, still gurgling for life as she takes the rest of the guards’ next. Kicking aside one of the bodies, Hela the Goddess of Death, pushes through the doors, and strides into the hallway. Odin’s back is to her, his arms clasped firmly behind him, a gesture that seems vulnerable, to all but those who truly know him. Another flick of her hand slams the doors shut behind her, another spear appearing to slip in between the handles to prevent others from following.

“Great Odin!” Hela calls, as she advances. “All-Father, bringer of peace and prosperity to the nine realms. King of Asgard. _Dearest_ father of mine.”

She stops but a few paces from the steps of the throne and sneers, “We need to talk.”

“Once there was a time, my daughter… where I would welcome your council,” the king sighs, turning his gaze to his first born, face shadowed with an emotion that resembles disappointment but it’s closer to weariness still. “Now, all you speak is poison and deceit.”

“Oh _spare_ me your condescension, father,” Hela’s silken alto drawls as she folds her arms and cocks her hip in a defiant display of petulance. “We both know this little chat has long been coming.”

Odin stares down at her a long while. Finally he moves to seat himself upon the throne, back straightening, a hard glint in his expression masks the fatigue he had displayed just moments before. And then he answers.

“Yes. Yes it has.”

Another tense pause fills the void of the hall, suffocating its lone two occupants before Hela opens hers arms in an overdramatic shrug. “Then let's have it, shall we? Where would you like to start, _Father_?”

“Perhaps we shall start with your blatant and utter disregard for my rules,” Odin replies, frowning. “Why did you ignore my orders to stand down on Vanaheim?”

Hela hums lifting one hand up to her face to absently examine her nails, and then shrugs again. “I merely thought to subdue the rebels there before they sought to undermine our rule. Take back control and send a clear message that traitors to the crown of Asgard will not be condoned.” 

“And yet I explicitly forbade you to slaughter them,” Odin rumbles, his voice as hard as his glare. “You ran them all through even as I called for you to cease.”

“They deserved to die–” Hela begins.

“What they _deserved_ ,” Odin cuts her off, “was a fair trial! A chance to plead their case before they were executed in such a wanton display of violence!”

Hela laughs. “And since when has Odin Borson demanded that our enemies be tried? Furthermore,” her voice drops all pretense of amusement though her smile remains. “Since when has the sight of blood become so appalling to you? _You_ who bore me from that very substance all those years ago?”

“A decision I have only just recently come to regret,” Odin grimly reflects.

A beat of silence falls over the room once more. Hela’s eyes glimmer now, but never fully form tears. Instead she taunts, voice low and quivering with a deep seated hatred just waiting to erupt.

“And this… _regret_ you suddenly feel. It wouldn’t have something to do with that woman, now would it?”

“That woman,” says Odin dangerously. “Is my Queen. And mother to the future king of Asgard.”

The smile finally falls from Hela’s face at that single word. _King_.

“…You dare,” she whispers. “You would usurp my throne? My kingdom? My birthright? You would pass it willingly to a bastard birthed by that _whore_ from Vanaheim?”

“ _Hold your tongue_ , Hela, if you care to keep it a little longer!” Odin barks.

“You used me!” Hela shouts over him. “Groomed me! Created me from your own essence using the very dark magic your precious _Queen_ so despises! Made me into this- this singular weapon! All so you could conquer the nine realms without having to stain your hands with the blood of innocents! You couldn’t be _bothered_ to waste your time and energy doing the dirtiest deeds yourself. So you sent me off instead, watched approving from afar as I massacred villages and towns after you decimated their armies!

“And now you suddenly fancy yourself _benevolent_ ,” Hela sneers, mouth twisted in a jest of a grin. “You lost your bloodlust and your spine. Threw away your ambitions. You think yourself a gracious, nobel ruler who demonstrates fairness, and accountability. You would have all the universe look upon you less as a conqueror and more as a love-struck old fool. All so you could thrust that whore and her half-breed spawn onto what is rightfully mine!”

“SILENCE, GIRL!” Odin roars leaping up from the throne and pointing menacingly down upon her. His finger shakes in his fury as he spits. “And choose your next words wisely lest you speak of the Queen of Asgard and its rightful heir so crassly! Daughter or no, I will not tolerate your treachery any longer!”

Odin’s power rumbles through the hall in a subtle but dangerous warning. Under such a threat, anyone else would quail under the might and wrath of the All-Father. Any other subject of Asgard would bow down, cower before the true fury of their king. But Hela… 

“ _Treachery_?” she repeats softly.

Hela’s eyes gleam a toxic green, her spine straightening. Rather than rear back and recoil under the rage of her father, she smiles. The room begins to tremble, the golden pillars rusting and creaking as the Goddess of Death meets the power of Odin head on and stands her ground, extending her own dark magic to permeate the structure around them.

“There stands only one traitor in this room, Odin, son of Bor. And it isn’t _me_.”

Their energies push and tear against one another, all the while a tiny form pads into the hall from the back archway to the far right of the throne, seemingly unnoticed. Drawn in by the curiously frightening sounds and quakes from within the throne room, he wobbles on bare cautious feet toward the source. Wide blue eyes stare transfixed at the horrifying spectacle before him, trembling as Hela speaks again.

“Pray attend to these words, All-Father,” says Hela with cold-blooded intensity, black tendrils rising around her, curling and writhing like the limbs of the dying. “You shall have your bastard son bear the burden of becoming the future King. He shall inherit Asgard, watch over the nine realms and all who dwell within them. He shall grow in strength and power befitting of the title ‘God of Thunder.’ All shall serve him loyally and without question. But…”

Suddenly her focus shifts to her right where a toddler just barely reaching his 100th year, halts in his tentative steps. Her eyes narrow as the falcon that catches sight of its prey and the child stands frozen in fear, his golden hair blown back by an unnatural gust of cold wind. Odin pales and makes to stand in front of the boy, shouting.

“Hela, don’t-!”

Whatever else Odin was about to say is drowned out by sudden and violent lunge of her tendrils, shooting forward and knocking aside the All-Father. They reach toward the child who stumbles back, sobbing from fright and confusion, and-

 

***

“Loki!”

Green eyes fly open as the prince of Asgard all but jumps up in his bed with a gasp, hands reaching out for the remnants of a dream that has instantly dissolved, forgotten in the moment of awakening. With a shuddering sigh, Loki lets his hands fall to his side, sweat cooling and rolling down his temple as the last fragments of the dream escape his conscious mind, which slowly begins to register the owner of the voice that roused him from his fitful slumber. He turns his head towards it and breaths out, voice laced with exhaustion and horse from sleep.

“Mother…”

“Loki darling,” Frigga says in a calming, warm voice, instantly sitting beside her son on the bed. Her hands brush the flyaway hairs that curl over his face and run in soothing circles over his head. “Are you alright?”

Loki nods, eyes shutting under her ministrations, his own hands coming up to cover hers, squeezing. “Yes… I am fine, thank you.”

“Loki…” Frigga says, hands moving to tilt his chin up more, eyes scanning his face with concern. “You look pale.”

“I am well, truly,” Loki assures, sighing deeply. “It was… It was nothing. Just a dream.”

“Not a good dream, I take it,” says Frigga, with a sad tilt of her mouth.

Loki blinks down at the sheets pooled around him, trying in vain to remember what it was that distressed him so. Slowly he shakes his head. 

“I can’t recall…” He lifts his gaze again and tries for a reassuring smile. “Probably for the best, though. Dreams are merely that, after all.”

A pause, then his tone shifts into something lighter. “Perhaps I dreamt that Fandral the Dashing propositioned me. Again.”

Frigga laughs at that, her own expression melting from worry to fondness. “I think the ladies of court would find that experience a pleasant one.”

“The ladies of court are _not_ the Prince of Asgard,” Loki sniffs, rolling his eyes. “And my standards, unlike theirs, are quite high.”

“Hush,” Frigga chides, kissing his forehead. Brushing the wrinkles from her dress, she rises and heads for the door. “Now wash and ready yourself. Today is a big day for you.”

“Oh, I know,” says Loki, a small teasing smile alighting his face, the fretful dream now far from his thoughts. “Loki Odinson, God of Mischief. The youngest prince of Asgard ever to be coronated.”

“And I couldn’t be more proud of you,” Frigga beams. “Your father has bestowed upon you a great honor.”

“Indeed…” Loki yawns, stretching and twisting himself around before reluctantly peeling away the covers of his bed. “I shall see you at breakfast, Mother.”

Frigga offers him one last smile before taking her leave. Once out of ear shot, the smile falls from her face, and concern resurfaces once more.

“Oh Loki… You of all people should know that the dreams of a god are often more than what they seem.”

***

Far below the castle, something stirs in the darkest, most forbidden corners of Asgard’s dungeons, as if awakened by the very same dream that had disturbed the prince. Heavy panting and the rattling of chains echo in the almost empty abyss of the dreary chamber. Suddenly a fist connects with the wall, cracking it slightly. Sparks of faint energy appear around the knuckles licking the skin like electrical currents before the hand withdraws, bloodied by the force of the impact. The chains slide and clink along the floor again as the cell’s lone occupant let’s out a shuddering, despairing sigh.

With a low rumbling growl, the prisoner curls back into himself, and opts to try and fall back to sleep, resigned to the knowledge that that very same nightmare would soon be back to wake him again.


	2. The Coronation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki's big day is here. Only things don't quite go as planned...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter, as promised! And for those who are curious as to what is going on with Thor, all will be revealed in time. Thank you and enjoy!

***

Ceremonies in Asgard are nothing short of extravagant. Always full of music and dancing, stocked with the finest of wines and the most hardy of meads. The feasts are no less than five courses, consisting of every delicacy unfathomable. The palace’s splendor is on full display, and so are its occupants. Moreover, as it was to be Prince Loki’s coronation, his was the most eye-catching of all.

Decked in the most superlative garbs of green and gold, and sporting his infamous horned helmet, Loki strides through the halls with a confidence that his rank expects, servants and guards bowing in deference as he passes. He carries himself with an elegance and mystic that has earned him certain notoriety among his people. 

Usually the great warriors of Asgard are regarded for their brawn and might, with the hardiest of men being revered as heroes, like the kings of past generations. Yet Loki, with his lithe build and natural grace, fights more like the Valkyries of old, a technique better suited to one who’s sorcery rivals only that of the All-Father and his Queen. It’s unusual for men to practice sorcery, even rarer still for such practitioners to be honored. Nevertheless, Loki is shown nothing other than the utmost respect and admiration for his skills in battle. 

There were, on rare occasions, a few disgruntled challengers who after having failed to best the prince would whisper of his trickery and deceit, how he stooped to using witchcraft since he lacked a true warriors’ strength. Those who did, not long later, would learn that their prince was not given the title “God of Mischief” for nothing.

Careful to avoid any guests or citizens that may wish to bid him congratulations, Loki makes his way through the gardens. He looks warily over his shoulder to be absolutely certain no one is following behind, which is why he ends up walking headlong into something, or someone, rather hard and ends up stumbling back, nearly losing his footing.

“Ooof!”

“Ho, steady there!” a pair of arms quickly reach out to break his fall, as a familiar voice laughs jovily by his ear. “You should take care to mind what’s ahead of you, My Prince. Suppose you bumped someone less handsome and chivalrous than me?”

“Yes, that would be most unfortunate,” Loki replies, repressing a sigh as he glances up at his savior of sorts. He’s not at all surprised to see Fandral standing before him. Behind him, Loki spots the other two of the infamous Warriors Three lounging close by. All of them appear to be dressed for the ceremony, armor more for show than for any practical use.

“Fandral,” Loki nods to him before doing the same over his shoulder. “Volstagg. Hogun. You are all welcome, as always.”

“A big day for you, ah Loki?” Volstagg greets, standing from his perch on one of the many fountains that have been installed specially for this occasion. “Everyone in the kingdom is talking about it.”

“Indeed, Your Highness. You must be ecstatic. And may I say,” Fandral interjects flashing a smile that makes the ladies in court swoon and takes a hold of Loki’s hand to bestow a kiss on his knuckles. “You look even more regal and glorious than ever.”

Loki withdraws his hand with a pinched smile, wiping it discreetly behind himself. “You flatter me. Both of you.”

“That’s enough, Fandral,” a female voice interrupts as Lady Sif, long time friend of the other three, appears with a polite smile, inclining her head at Loki. “My Prince. Congratulations are in order.”

Loki laughs lightly. “Not quite, Sif. Not until my father officiates it. The ceremony hasn’t even begun.”

“Well then, let's get on with it,” Volstagg grins, giving Loki a good natured thump on his back that sways the younger man slightly forward. “They wait for you, after all.”

“And there’s so much for you to discover when you are crowned king,” Fandral grins, leaning over conspiratorially. “Just think of all you shall do, Loki. All the things you have not yet done.”

“I am not permitting you to bed me,” Loki says flatly.

Volstagg’s laughter booms through the courtyard, drowning out a slight cough of amusement from Hogun as Fandral’s face falls.

“In any event,” Sif cuts in, failing to hide a small smirk behind her hand. “Fandral is, to some extent, correct, Your Highness. There will be a lot for you to learn once you assume the throne. Things that were previously kept from your knowledge.”

Loki nods his agreement, “Of course… I look forward to the wisdom the All-Father will pass on to me.”

In this, Loki doesn’t lie. While he may have reservations on the notion of becoming king, there were, naturally, benefits. The arrangement would most certainly allow him more access to everything he had been previously denied in his otherwise lofty status.

“Well, we best take our leave,” Fandral announces with an exaggerated stretch, winking fondly over his shoulder. “It wouldn’t do for the Warriors Three to arrive late to their future King’s coronation.”

Loki smiles back, finding it to be genuine this time despite himself. “Thank you… all of you.”

“Until later, Prince Loki,” says Sif with another bow.

With a final, gentler pat to Loki’s shoulder, Volstagg turns following Fandral and Sif towards the Throne Room, the three falling into convivial conversation among each other. Only Hogun lingers behind, a thoughtful tilt of his head as he bows once to Loki. When he rises again, a ghost of a smile is nearly present on his stoic face.

“Thor would have been proud,” he says, making Loki flush slightly from the praise. 

Coming from the only one in the group, outside of Volstagg, that had actually known Loki’s brother all those years before, means more than any words. Before he could formulate a response, Hogun quietly walks away, leaving the young god to stand pondering in the now empty courtyard.

***

If there’s one thing Odin is better at than ruling an entire kingdom, it’s speeches. Of course it goes without saying that every King pays homage to their successor with grand words of praise and pride, exaggerating past accomplishments and vocalizing hopes for the future. Not that Loki isn’t appreciative of the sentiments, but the longer he kneels before his father, the more aware he becomes of just how uncomfortable it is to do so. 

“-and now. Loki. My son. My heir. Prince of Asgard.”

 _Finally_ , Loki thinks with an inward sigh.

“Do you swear to guard the nine realms?”

“I swear,” Loki answers.

“And do you swear, to preserve the peace?”

“I swear.”

“Do you swear,” Odin asks, with a firmer, the more serious tone in the ritual, “to cast aside all selfish ambition and to pledge yourself only to the good of the realm?”

Loki stares back to Odin, meeting his gaze with conviction as he repeats, louder. “I swear.”

“Then on this day, I, Odin All-Father, proclaim you–”

The King abruptly stops mid-speech, pausing as the sound of slow rolling thunder suddenly rumbles throughout the room. Loki puzzles at the sudden change in weather. They weren’t expecting storms this day, now were they? It’s mildly annoying, and Loki finds himself pitying the flower arrangements his mother so diligently worked on outdoors. Odin’s eye widens a moment, his mouth falling open as though realizing something, then shuts it with an audible click. Suddenly he returns his attention to the room and holds out his arms.

“The coronation of Prince Loki has been cancelled.”

The room erupts into rukus, with several voices speaking out at once, all confused, some demanding. Immediately, Loki stands from his kneeling position at the foot of the throne and blinks. His eyes flicker to Frigga, searching hers for possible answers, yet his mother seems caught unaware by the sudden announcement, too. It all falls to silence again as Gungnir raps the floor twice, Odin’s face hardening despite the worry Loki reads hidden in his expression.

“We ask for your pardon and patience as I have a matter of urgent business to attend to. The ceremony shall commence on the eve of tomorrow.”

Once more, a befuddled murmur breaks throughout the hall as Odin makes haste for the exit to his left, his personal guard accompanying him. 

“Father!” Loki says hurrying to Odin’s side, breathless and determined. “Let me go with you.”

“No, Loki,” Odin says, shaking his head. “Stay here and watch over your mother, I will handle this matter alone.”

“But Father–”

“That was _not_ a request.”

Loki’s mouth falls shut. The words are not a threat by any means, but a warning. Merely another firm reminder to the prince that he best remember his place in the royal family. He was the sole heir to the throne, but that hadn't changed the fact that he wasn’t the King, after all.

Not yet.

Soft hands fall upon his shoulders, Frigga’s voice soothing in his ear, “Come, Loki. Let your father do what he must.”

“Mother…”

He watches as his father hurries from the room, the sting of the King’s words still making him stiff with embarrassment and frustration. Even so, he allows his mother to gently guide him away from the throne room, leaving behind a menagerie of court officials and royal guests whispering and gossiping among themselves over the unexpected cancellation.

“Whatever his reasons,” whispers Frigga in his ear, “you must trust that your father knows what’s best for you. For all of us.”

Her words offer little in comfort, though the effort is appreciated. They speak no more as they hurry to the Queen’s private chambers, the sound of rain pelting the windows as the storm outside continues. Many questions run through Loki’s mind, whirling in circles without answer. But he knows at least one place where he may yet find them.

“If I may, Mother,” Loki says once they’re alone, carefully taking her hands in his and staring at her in hopes that she would recognize the question in his eyes. “There is something else I need to do.”

***

It wasn’t often that Loki visited Asgard’s gatekeeper. The man is something of an enigma to the young heir. Even though he was one of his father’s most trusted advisors, and a long time friend of the royal family, there was still much about Heimdall that Loki didn’t know. It both fascinated and puzzled the prince to have someone who he couldn’t get a clear read on.

The strange storm had mostly passed, leaving almost as suddenly as its arrival, no more than a distant rumble now. The rain nearly a refreshing drizzle kissing Loki’s skin and curling his hair at the ends by the time he crosses the bridge, waving his hand absently to dry himself. He finds Heimdall at his post, back towards Loki and eyes facing out into the vast and endless universe before him. His deep voice echoes within the doom as Loki approaches.

“What brings you to my keep, My Prince?”

Loki smirks slightly, “You knew I was coming.”

“For once,” Heimdall answers in an even tone, but Loki laughs, recognizing a hint of exasperation tinting his otherwise neutral demeanor.

For quite some time, Loki has mastered advanced-shielding spells that keep him well concealed from everyone. Including the gatekeeper. It has been rather useful, to say the least… especially when he wished to indulge himself in a bit of mischief. Heimdall didn’t always find the results so amusing, but had still, for reasons unknown and much to Loki’s gratitude, kept this piece of information to himself. 

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?” Loki inquires.

“The ceremony was postponed,” the taller man responds, gaze still locked on the stars. “The King has business to attend to, and you were told to stay behind until his return.”

Heimdall spares a glance over at Loki, and observes the slightly sour look that the younger man is not quite able to hide, tilting his head with a considering look. 

“Which is why you have come to me. To seek advice on something that troubles you immensely.”

“Nothing ever escapes your notice, does it?” Loki mutters dryly, before he starts pacing, cape swishing around every time he turns. “I need to know what is it Father trying to conceal from me. If I am to be King, should I not know all the dangers that face my kingdom?”

Heimdall shakes his head. “You know good and well, Loki, that I cannot answer that. I have sworn an oath to your father to serve him and abide by his wishes.”

“But someday you shall serve _me_ ,” Loki insists, ceasing his pacing and placing a hand on his hip. He must look childish doing so, but at the moment vexation wins over decorum. “Does that not count for anything?”

“It will,” Heimdall nods slowly, words patient, but assertive. “When you are officially King of Asgard.”

Loki waves him off with a small huff. “It matters not. I’ll just have to find out what he’s hiding on my own.”

“If that is what you intend, then I cannot stop you.” Heimdall shrugs slightly, eyes falling once more out into the vast universe before him.

“But you disapprove,” Loki says, more a casual observation rather than a question.

“I don’t presume to pass judgement upon the future king, My Prince,” says Heimdall. He pauses, gaze moving from the stars to the prince, impossible to discern as always. “I only seek to caution your curiosity. The burdens of the monarchy are heavy indeed. What you seek may only weigh heavier still upon your shoulders.”

Slowly Loki folds his arms, arching a brow as he takes a conspiratorial step forward. “And… were I to ask you to speak plainly? What would you say then?”

Heimdall's expression darkens at this, golden all-seeing eyes fixing squarely on Loki. “Then I would say this. There are secrets, Odinson, that will only cause you grief and strife. My concern is that it may be too much too soon.”

“Of course,” Loki scoffs, tongue clicking as he turns away sharply. “As if this entire coronation isn’t already ‘ _too much too soon_.’ As if I haven’t been forced to carry the responsibilities of the crown long before today.”

Heimdall doesn’t respond, but Loki can almost feel the pity in his gaze, and it only makes him that much more frustrated.

Eventually Loki sighs, hand coming up to comb furiously through his hair. “If I am to become king as everyone wishes, how exactly am I meant to rule whilst being treated like a child? Am I so weak and helpless that everyone around me seeks to protect me from shattering like glass?”

“…Your brother once asked me such a question,” Heimdall says at last.

Loki looks up, startled. “Thor?”

Heimdall nods slowly.

Loki finds himself at a loss for words. Again, It wasn’t often that Heimdall would volunteer such information about his family, Thor least of all. They were close, that much the prince knew. Mother had said that of all Thor’s friends, Heimdall was his best, the one who his older brother would turn to for good council as well as comradery. 

“…What did you tell him?” 

“The same thing I am about to tell you now,” the gatekeeper approaches him, eyes sharp and expression carefully controlled. “It has _never_ been a matter of you being weak. It have only ever been about your well-being. I am tasked with many responsibilities, My Prince. Among them, protecting you from every danger you may face.”

He steps back at last, back once again facing Loki as he sighs. “Even those which might stem from your own ambitions.”

“Prince Loki!”

Loki’s gaze flickers away from Heimdall as one of his father’s personal guards makes haste to meet him at the edge of the Bifrost.

“Your Highness, it’s your father. He’s fallen into the Odinsleep.”


	3. The Dungeons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki takes the throne, leading him to try and solve the mystery of Odin's sudden decent into the Odinsleep. And to perhaps search for answers to questions he's had for a long time...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this chapter a bit early since I may be busy tomorrow.
> 
> Once more, I hope you are enjoying this! Thank you.

Historically speaking, this is not how kings of Asgard begin their reign. As a matter of precedence, a residing king would choose an heir (preferably their eldest living son), and then crown them before all of Asgard in a grand and glorious coronation. This was a tradition dating long before scholars started recording the history of the nine realms, and it had never once been broken. It was to be the same for Loki Odinson, had it not been for the strange events that brought him to this moment.

From his spot in the darkest corner of the royal bedchamber, Loki watches his mother kneeling before his father’s bed, stroking the king’s slumbering face with one hand while the other holds tight to Odin’s own. She is every bit the gentle, loving Queen of Asgard the people adore, diligently staying by the All-Father’s side until his awakening. But what the people will never see is the concern as she gazes down upon Odin. In this room, away from public perception, she is but a wife and mother, keeping careful watch over her beloved with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She is trying to be strong for both her husband and her child. It pains Loki to see her so. 

On either side of the bed perch his father’s ravens, Huginn and Muninn, their glossy feathers ruffled from distress. The two are ever-watchful even as their master sleeps, and right now their gazes fall upon Loki.

“You can speak to him, you know,” says Frigga, eyes flickering over to her son at last, her hand falling away from Odin’s face, gesturing for Loki to come closer. “He can see and hear us even now.”

“How long will it last?” Loki inquires, approaching the bed with cautious steps, eyeing the two birds who watch him warily, feeling suddenly much younger than he is.

“I don’t know,” Frigga answers softly, looking back at Odin with a small sigh. “This time is different… we were unprepared.”

Loki stops beside where his mother sits, looking down upon his father and feeling a sense of wrongness. Everything about this day has felt unsettling, but nothing so perfectly illustrates that fact as the sight before him now. He’s never seen his father look so vulnerable. So old… a lump forms in his throat until he forces it down through sheer willpower.

“I’ll never get used to seeing him like this,” admits Loki, laying a hand upon Frigga’s shoulder as he murmurs. “The most powerful being in the nine realms laying helpless… until his body is restored.”

“He’s put it off so long now,” Frigga whispers, a slight tremor in her tone. “That I fear…”

She trails off with a small shake of her head, standing suddenly to wrap her arms tight around Loki. He doesn’t hesitate to return the embrace, head resting against hers as he allows them both a moment to feel the gravity of their situation. He knows what she fears, for it lingers in the back of his own mind. The concern that Odin may never fully recover from this episode is very real. His father had been stubbornly refusing to fall into the Odinsleep, though it was well past due. It was foolish gamble against time, and yet all the same Odin took that risk. 

Still, Loki knows good and well that the All-Father’s reluctance to heed the call of the Odinsleep was only partially to blame for this predicament. There was something else at play. Something that, much more than likely, has to do with what triggered the abrupt postponement of his coronation, and what went down soon after. Something that had proven too much for Odin to bear in an already compromised state. 

“You’re a good son,” Frigga says into his neck, pulling Loki from his thoughts, her voice wet with emotion. “We mustn’t lose hope that your father will return to us.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Loki says shuddering, forcing his voice to remain steady in spite of his unease. “I’m not ready–”

Frigga draws back from him, hands firmly grasping his arms, as she implores, “You _are_ , Loki. Your father never would have considered a coronation for you at such a young age had he not believed in you.”

Her hands release his arms to cup his face as she continues, “I have faith in you, Loki. You must learn to have some in yourself.”

Before Loki can even formulate a response, the doors to the bedchamber suddenly open and guards appear outside. They immediately fall to their knees upon seeing Loki. One of his father’s advisors then sweeps past the guards and enters the room, carrying Gungnir with him. He too, kneels when he reaches the young prince, hands extending to present the staff of the All-Father to the chosen heir. Loki’s eyes dart back up to Frigga’s, silently seeking her direction.

“The burden of the crown falls to you, my son,” declares Frigga solemnly, hands gently brushing Loki’s cheeks before she steps back and lets them fall away. “Until Odin awakens, Asgard is yours.”

Loki stares at his mother, then down to Gungnir resting in the hands of the advisor, the smooth metal catching the light of the dimly flickering touches. Hesitantly, Loki reaches out to take it. The staff sits cool and heavy in his grasp. It feels like power. _Real_ power. Not the illusion of kinghood, but rather the actual responsibility it. It scares him to wield it.

And yet…

“I know that you will make your father so very proud,” Frigga says, smiling lightly. Her voice remains steady in spite of the unshed tears catching the corners of her eyes.

Loki’s eyes slide up to his mother’s again, returning her smile with one of his own, masking his inhibitions with quiet confidence. He’s afraid of this power, yes. Terrified, if he were to speak in truth. But with this power lays an extraordinary opportunity. To learn more. To see more. To uncover the things that he had been shielded from as a prince. And Loki fully intends to make the most of it.

“I swear I shall do my very best,” Loki speaks, his attention falling back to the advisor and guards still kneeling before him. He straightens his back and holds the staff a little tighter in his hands to ground himself. “For the good of the realm, I accept this burden.”

***

As far back as Loki could recall, one of the few things he looked forward to do on the day of his coronation was the freedom to explore any part of the kingdom he wished without reproach. And there was one area in particular that long occupied his curiosity.

Once in his youth, Odin had deemed him old enough to learn about what kings must do to protect the realms from chaos. Enforcing law and order was the first step.

Bright green eyes took in every cell, every prisoner while his ears were carefully hanging on to his father’s every word. Mother always likened his brain to a sponge, soaking up every bit of knowledge he could obtain. She also noted his unique ability to spot trouble. More importantly, she worried over his affinity for chasing right after it instead of staying well away. Thus, it was only natural that during their tour of the dungeons, Loki’s peculiar habit led him to notice something rather unusual.

“Father,” said Loki. “Why is this hall so empty?”

Indeed, it was empty. Eerily so. The two or three cells that existed held no occupants. Not a single soul to be found. Not even a guard posted outside the long wooden doors at the end of its stretch.

Odin’s gaze met Loki’s for a moment, his single eye revealing nothing as he stared down at his son, then back to the area of his heir’s apparent interest.

“That area is strictly forbidden,” Odin had said, the tone of his voice all but making it clear that he would offer no further explanation even if Loki asked. “You must never venture past the doors at the end of the west hall.”

“But why not?” pressed the prince, despite recognizing his father’s intonation. “What’s beyond-”

“That, my son,” Odin cut off firmly. “Is for me to know and for you to learn later… when, and _only_ when, you are crowned king. Until then, you are never, _ever_ permitted to open those doors. Understood?” 

He had, of course, solemnly sworn he would stay well away from that part of the dungeons. He had, of course, lied. 

Ever since then, Loki had been curious to find out what exactly his father keeps hidden there. It was one of the reasons he had practiced a concealing spell so diligently. His very first attempts to sneak down there had been botched when he unwittingly triggered an alarm in the main section of the dungeons. He was lucky enough to escape the in the midst of the panic without anyone being the wiser to his involvement. His second attempt had very nearly been a success until one of Odin’s ravens blew his cover, cawing as it sensed something lurking near the forgotten hallway. Once more he was lucky, for the the winged menace had not identified the source of the disturbance. After that particular incident, Loki was wary enough to not try again.

Now, at long last, he is finally going to fulfill his wish. Only, it’s under very different circumstances than he imagined it to be. And instead of excitement, he feels dread.

It’s not purely fun that draws Loki to this isolated hallway. It’s an instinctual pull he feels deep within himself. He’s always felt that pull, even as a child, but it’s stronger now than ever before. Loki can no longer ignore it, especially not after searching in vain elsewhere in the castle for clues as to what caused his father to succumb to the Odinsleep,. All the answers he seeks lay in this lonely section of the dungeons. He’s sure of it.

Still, something gives him pause as he reaches for the handle of the imposing wooden doors with ancient runes imprinted across the panels. There’s magic woven into the structure. Old magic. _Powerful magic_. Loki shuts his eyes and presses a careful hand against the grooves and planes in the ancient oak structure, tentatively reaching out with his own seidr to test it. The spell is certainly potent, possibly laced with a hidden curse for those not authorized to breech this entrance. It’s enough to keep the young prince turned king on his guard.

 _Oh well_ , thinks Loki. _Perhaps a quick peak would be enough to satisfy._

With a deep breath, Loki concentrates his power into carefully dismantling the barrier between himself and the door. He makes quick, but steady work of unwinding the ancient spell. For most, it would prove to be a nearly impossible task. For the son and pupil of the All-Mother, however, it’s rather like untangling a particularly stubborn clump of knotted thread. Tedious and irritating, to be certain, but Loki has never shied away from such tests. He feels slowly for the subtle flaws and weaks spots, pushing at them until they snap and frey one by one. His hands start to tremble slightly as he finally reaches the very last strand holding the enchantment in place. His tongue peeks out to wet his lips as he utters an incantation, coaxing the spell to yield to his whim. It trembles violently, vibrating in protest before it finally breaks. 

With an exhausted groan, Loki leans heavily against the now harmless wood, taking a few moments to catch his breath. A small, triumphant smile finds its way into his expression, shocked laugher bubbling up without restraint. It wasn’t every day a sorcerer could break one of Odin’s spells. Knowing he had just done so in under a couple of minutes surprises even him. Now, there is but one more thing to do. Rolling his shoulders and pulling himself away from his own self-congratulatory musings, Loki takes a step back and points Gungnir in front of him.

“ _By order of Loki, King of Asgard, I command you_ ,” He taps the spear sharply upon the doors and whispers. “ _Open_.”

Creaking and groaning echos in the hall as the doors slowly slide apart, granting Loki access to a very dark, spiral stone stairwell. Sighing in mild annoyance, he grabs a torch off the wall closest to him and lights it with a snap of his fingers. Shining the light before him, Loki takes in a breath, then exhales shakily to try and quell his anxiety for whatever lays ahead. Then carefully, Loki steps beyond the threshold and onto the descending staircase, creeping the old double doors close behind him with a resounding click.

The young king follows the slightly sloping stairs as they plunge deeper and deeper beneath the castle, winding toward… Loki knew not where. Were he not so drained from his earlier dealings with the door, he would puzzle further over why this was all kept from him.Still, even as the seemingly endless descent through the bleak and narrow stairwell continues, Loki knows there’s no turning back now. He could only hope his efforts to reach this place weren’t for naught.

Then, at last, Loki can see the bottom where an arching entryway appears doorless and curiously lit on the other side. Practically jumping the last step, Loki crosses through the archway and into a presumably large room, for even with additional light from his own torch, the hanging flames do little to fully reveal what he’s stumbled upon. 

Loki takes in the chamber with an astonished gasp. It’s far too dark to really make anything out in detail, but the little he can see hardly resembles the rest of dungeons. For one, the room is circular in appearance, with a strong barrier running along the edges, but Loki doesn’t see any cells. There are no lights beyond the archway, giving the impression that it is merely an empty space. Much as it frustrates him not to see the entirely of the space around him, he decides not to waste his magic to illuminate the room in full.

He walks leisurely to the very center of the room, shining his torch over his head and pausing. Above the god is a large domed ceiling. It’s like the one in his father’s throne room, only older. In it, he sees images of his father and mother, younger than they are now. And then he also sees what he presumes to be his older brother, Thor, standing beside them. Loki follows the moving pictures as they play out scenes of the royal family in the decades before he was born, watching how Thor grows up. He watches him grow from a child in one panel, following in his father’s footsteps to become king, to the next where he is a teen learning the ways of a true warrior of Asgard, a young Hogun training with him. The very next panel depicts him as a young man standing with his infamous hammer in hand, Mjolnir, side by side with Odin, as they face down frost giants in the Battle of Midgard. Loki drinks in the other panels that show his father facing off King Laufey of Jotunheim, as Thor takes on armies of frost giants. Mjolnir breaks through their formations, while Volstagg and Hogun cover the prince along with the rest of Asgard’s soldiers. Panel by panel, Loki watches as they drive the beasts back to Jotunheim, Thor leading the charge until the very last panel. It’s blank.

“What?” Loki frowns to himself, squinting his eyes to see if he is imaging it. No matter which way he shines the light, nothing appears in the empty space where the final part of the war should have been shown. Where Asgard was victorious, but paid a heavy price. He remembers the ending even if the paintings are missing it. Odin protected Midgard and made a peace treaty with Jotunheim, striping them of the Casket of Ancient Winters, the source of their power. In exchange, the King of Asgard lost his right eye… and his first born son.

So distracted by this mysterious, fascinating mural is he, that Loki doesn’t immediately notice that he’s not alone in this room. That there is, indeed, one single cell in this chamber. And it is very much occupied. Not until a low growling voice echoes directly behind him…

“ _Who are you_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! As always, comments and critics are encouraged and welcomed :)


	4. The Prisoner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki meets the lone resident of the dungeon's mysterious West Wing, and finds himself with more questions than answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so pleased and surprised by the lovely reception from you guys, and I hope the rest of this fic doesn't disappoint.
> 
> Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy this next chapter!

_“Mother…”_

_The All-Mother looks up from her book to see her son standing in the doorway, his favorite blanket clutched in one tiny hand, the other rubbing his half opened green eyes in a stubborn attempt to fight off sleep._

_“Loki?” Frigga frowns, closing her book and sitting up in her bed. “What are you doing up so late? Your father would disapprove.”_

_“He’s not here, he’s on Vanaheim,” replies the child with a pout that quickly turns meek as his eyes fall to the floor. “… I cannot sleep.”_

_“Whyever not, darling?”_

_At first, Loki gives no answer, his head ducking further down so that his hair falls over his face. He remains silent until Frigga prompts him once more. “Loki?”_

_With a tiny exhale, the young prince mumbles. “Fandral told me there is a monster living beneath the ground…”_

_Frigga blinks, then smiles warmly. “Oh my dear boy… I am sure he was merely teasing you.”_

_“But it’s true!” insists Loki, looking back up again earnestly. “It_ is _true, Mother! I hear the soldiers talk about it, too! They say an ancient beast dwells underneath us all, that when the earth shakes and the skies grow dark, it’s the beast losing its temper!”_

_Gently shaking her head, Frigga tries to console her child with another small smile. “Loki, I promise you that even if there was such a creature, your father would never let anything happen to you. And neither would I. As for the dark skies… What have I told you before? About the thunderstorms?”_

_Loki hesitates, then says, “That it is my brother in Valhalla. That Thor is sending us a reminder that he’s watching over us.”_

_Frigga nods. “Exactly. You have your brother’s protection as well as ours, Loki. Even though he is no longer with us, he is always looking after you.”_

_The room remains quiet for a moment as Loki lets her words settle. Then he smiles, face relaxing as the fear of shadows unseen is outshined for the present. “Will you tell me the story of my brother?”_

_“Which one, my sweet boy?” laughs Frigga. “There are many.”_

_“Tell me of how he defeated the monsters on Jotunheim,” Loki grinned hurrying to his mother’s side. “Tell me how he saved Midgard and our people from their terror.”_

_“Do not call the frost giants ‘monsters,’ dearest,” the Queen bites her lip, eyes looking away to conceal the pain of recalling of her eldest son and his untimely death. “It is late, child. Perhaps a shorter story will do for the present–”_

_“Oh please, Mother, please!” Loki pleads. “That one is my favorite.”_

_Frigga glances back over to Loki, regarding him for a long moment, expression both sad and fond. Then at last, she relents, patting the space of the bed beside her with a long sigh. “Very well, come along… But_ just _for tonight. Your father wants you to frequent our bedchambers less now that you are older.”_

_Nodding eagerly, Loki accepts the invitation, jumping up onto the space where his father usually would sleep, crawling closer to his mother and curling up at her side. His eyes drift closed as Frigga strokes his hair and tells him of how his older brother followed their father into battle. He lets sleep take him as her voice softly recounts of how he fought bravely to defend the mortals and his fellow soldiers. And how at the end of it all, Thor fell…_

***

Loki freezes in the center of the room after hearing the resounding voice echo behind him. He could curse himself for being so absorbed by an old relic. A painting, of all things. So distracted by pictures of Asgard’s glorious past that he never bothered to properly check the entirety of the chamber before he entered it. _Foolish_ , he inwardly berates. Far too hasty. A part of him starts to wonder why in the nine realms he thought this was even a good idea to start with.

Often in his youth he had heard tall tales of monsters living in Asgard, unseen and dangerous. There was even one such rumor of a beast that lived beneath Asgard itself, hiding in the ground until a foolish Asgardian came to awaken it. He had been afraid as a small child, but quickly grew to dismiss them as legends the common folk told amongst themselves to explain away strange events; a bad harvest, the occasional drought… sudden and violent squalls appearing from nowhere.

_I should have paid better attention_ , he thinks sourly, curiosity and stubbornness keeping him rooted where he was even as he fights his instinctive reaction to retreat.

“Well?” speaks the voice again, pulling Loki out of his momentary mental reproach and reminding his head to focus on his current predicament.

Then slowly he turns around, aiming the torch in the direction of where he thought he heard the voice call to him. He now sees the lone cell occupying this dismal space, unlit and armed with a barrier the likes of which Loki has never seen. Not even throughout the rest of the dungeons. Whoever—or perhaps _whatever_ —occupies this chamber must be truly powerful to warrant these sort of precautions.

Powerful enough, maybe, to force even his father to fall into the Odinsleep?

Though Loki can now see the prison cell, it’s far too dark to make out what lingers within. He catches just a glimpse of an outline in the far corner of the room is shown. It’s a large silhouette to be certain. Imposing, even as it stays perfectly still and makes no threatening movements, but that’s not what concerns the young king most. There’s power humming faintly from within the prison. Now that it has Loki’s attention, he can feel the pulse of that power just beneath the exterior of this mysterious man. Loki swallows down his trepidation and clears his throat.

“Really now… Is that any way to address the King of Asgard?” Loki takes a moment to be impressed at himself for not allowing his nerves to show.

There’s a pause, then the sound of chains rattling precedes the prisoner’s confused reply. “King? Last I knew, that title belonged to Odin All-Father.”

“It did- Or rather _does_ , still,” Loki answers, silver tongue quickly finding the proper narrative. “Odin has appointed his heir to be the one to carry the mantle until his return. And that heir would be me.”

There’s another pause. “And you are…?”

“I am Loki. Odinson. God of Mischief and the Crown Prince of Asgard,” he begins, masking his discomfort with an air of bored neutrality. “Who, may I ask, are you?”

“Odinson…” The voices repeats, confusion evident in it’s tone. Suddenly the prisoner laughs, long, low and dark, like the rumble of rolling thunder just before the storm breaks. “It seems the All-Father didn’t waste any time finding himself a replacement.”

Loki blinks, frowning. “…Replacement?”

“Though, I have to say,” the prisoner muses thoughtfully. “As far as heirs go, you’re a lot smaller than the last model. Believe me, I would know better than anyone.”

“Wh- small?!” Loki sputters in shock, fighting to regain his regal facade with an indignant huff, vexation and pride overriding his fear. “Who, _exactly_ , do you think you’re talking to?”

“In any event,” continues the man, seemingly not taking notice of Loki’s frustration and lack of decorum. Or if he did, he simply chose to ignore it. “What brings the King of Asgard here? Haven’t you more pressing things to attend to in whilst Odin slumbers away? Things like, say… running a kingdom?”

Loki grits his teeth, but says nothing. Trying to keep himself composed, however, proving to be more difficult. He wasn't accustomed to be spoken at in such a dismissive way. Most people gave the prince the proper respect he deserved. The very few who didn’t usually never dared to do so to his face.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” the prisoner says, the sound of chains sliding around again follows as he presumably shifts about. “It’s nice to have company in my humble abode. I do not get many visitors these days. _Especially_ not ones as fetching as you.”

In spite of himself, Loki feels his cheeks grow warm at the prisoner’s deep, alluring voice before he shakes his head in embarrassment. He knows he needs to be on his guard, not allow this detainee to rattle him. It has not escaped Loki’s mind that he’s yet to have the question answered of who this man is and why he is kept so well concealed. But much as he loathes to admit it… this is starting to grow more irritating by the minute.

“In case it wasn’t clear to you before,” Loki forces his voice to remain smooth and calm, though he’s inwardly pondering creative ways to hex this brazen brute into the next millenia. “I am rather new to this role as ‘King of Asgard’, and my father was… _preoccupied_ before I could be properly briefed on matters concerning the realm. I decided to try a more hands-on approach to see what I could discover.”

“Which again leads me back to the question of why you would find yourself _here_ , Highness?” The voice drops it’s amusement, sounding suddenly lower and more ominous. “Do you not wonder why it was you were forbidden access to these chambers until now?”

Loki’s mouth tilts into the slightest smirk, though the hand that grips Gungnir unconsciously tightens around the staff. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to enlighten me, then.”

“Perhaps,” agrees the prisoner. “Then again… Perhaps not. After all, where is the kindness in shattering the new King of Asgard’s perfect vision of home before he’s ready to see the truth?”

Something in Loki’s mind tells him not to take the bait. To try and get to the bottom of what happened with his father quickly, and then leave this place at once. Reason, unfortunately, loses out to curiosity.

“And what would you know about the truth?” Loki arches a brow. “You, a prisoner of the crown, locked away in the depths of the realm eternal for reasons yet unclear to me. Precisely what would you understand about what is and is not ‘ _true_ ’?”

The prisoner chuckles again, but there’s not a trace of it’s earlier mirth. “ _Everything_. Everything and nothing all at once. Contemplating things becomes something of a past time when you are in solitary confinement for centuries. Even something so complex as ‘truth.’”

“You speak in riddles, and my patience grows thin,” Loki says, fighting back the urge to snap. He keeps his tone steady, but firm, a hard glint in his eye. “Now for the last time, tell me who you are and why you are kept separate from the rest of the prisoners of Asgard?”

The stranger doesn’t respond, and after a minute, Loki’s almost certain he’s going to refuse to answer. Then the heavy drag of chains fills the chamber as the stranger stands up and steps towards Loki. 

“Perhaps,” says the prisoner so quietly, Loki almost misses what comes next. “It would be best to show you after all. To have you see with your own eyes what your ears would deny if spoken.”

At first the torchlight only reveals the feet but then slowly, the stranger draws closer. _Closer_. Soon legs and torso and arms, all massive muscles and brute strength, appear before Loki’s widening eyes. And then at last, the face-

“Y-you…” Loki gasps and reels back, nearly dropping the torch to the ground as his free hand comes up to clap over his now gaping mouth. But it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. 

Slowly the god of mischief breaths, voice suddenly sounding small even to his own ears. 

“ _Brother_.”


	5. The God of Thunder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki finally meets Thor... More questions go unanswered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so grateful for the support you guys are sending via comments and kudos. I'm very happy you lovely readers are enjoying this and I look forward to sharing more with you now!
> 
> Thank you!

Silence. Long, suffocating silence falls over the room, permeating into the very core of it’s lone two occupants. It remains so for neither know how long. The two gods regard one another with turbulent emotions. Thor’s more resigned, a certain melancholy hidden beneath his cold countenance. Loki’s more stunned, mind in complete disbelief, but unable to deny what is right there in front of his very eyes. It was not a trick (as trickster god such as himself would know), nor was this another one of his more vivid dreams. His mind and body are so acutely aware of everything he is experiencing that he knows he _must_ be awake.

“How?” Loki asks in a quivering voice, eyes still fixed upon the man before him, afraid to so much as blink for fear that Thor would simply vanish. “How is this possible?”

His older brother. His _deceased_ older brother. The hero of Asgard who had fallen defending his army from the frost giants during their last stand in Jotunheim. The man who had been lauded in songs and tales since before Loki could fully understand them. The man he had admired as a wide-eyed boy who wanted nothing more than to make proud the very brother he had always believed to be _dead_. 

And yet here Thor stood. Tall. _Massive_. Every inch the warrior the stories described him as. Even more impressive than the portraits Loki has seen of him, including the mural he had been admiring minutes ago. He’s everything and more than what Loki had even imagined his brother to be. But Thor is also quite… _different_. 

His hair isn’t long and golden, but shorn and dull. His posture hardly boasts of the arrogance, or vanity his mother and father would fondly speak of. Rather he carries himself as a man burdened by the loss of innocence and the hardships of a life unknown to anyone but himself. All who spoke of him talked of the light in his smiles and the comfort of his hearty laughter. All Loki sees and hears are the shackles on Thor’s wrists and ankles with long chains attached near his feet connecting to the wall near his cot. There’s not a trace of merriment upon his face, not a hint of the youth the older god used to have.

But it’s his eyes that are the most jarring by far. Not at all the electric blue praised by orators over the decades, nor clear as the sky at noon, as his mother recalled. They certainly are blue, but more muted and dark, with grey undertones. Like the color of the sky just before the storm. More startling still is what he sees in them. So cold… so angry. And also-

Loki turns away, breath coming out in sharp gasps that he understand to be the beginnings of a panic attack. The question of ‘why’ still buzzes through him as he fights to regain his composure, forcing himself to just _breathe_. In. Out.

“Now you see me, Your Highness,” Thor says quietly, the gruffness of his voice almost apologetic before it shifts back to nonchalance. “Or should I call you ‘ _brother_?’”

The emphasis on the last word causes Loki to wince, eyes squeezing shut. Long had he dreamed of a chance to somehow get to meet Thor. To hear him say the words “brother.” But not like this. _Never_ like this. Not with such flipancy and bitterness. Loki had wished for many things in his youth. For freedom. For knowledge. For his brother to still be alive. Now he’s at last receiving them… in all the ways he never wanted.

At last, Loki’s breathing evens out. His hands, which he had not noticed were trembling, fall still once more, one maintaining its hold on the torch, the other keeping closed around Gungnir. He opens his eyes, and glances over his shoulder to meet Thor’s unsettling stare, voice steadier than he thought it would sound given his present state.

“…Why?”

Thor tilts his head slightly. “Why what?“

“Why are you here?” Loki clarifies, eyes scanning Thor’s, imploring. “For what reason did our father-?”

“ _Your_ father,” Thor interrupts, a warning unspoken in his growl. “Odin disowned me the day he bound me and cast me into this pit. I am not his son… I am his greatest failure.”

“But _why_?” presses Loki, moving to stand closer to the barrier.

“Because I am a monster,” Thor says, a dark, self deprecating smile adorning his features, stepping back with every advance Loki makes, the chains at his feet sliding across the floor. He moves to settle onto a barrel in the corner of the cell with sigh. “More so than the race I was sent to wipe out decades ago.”

“I don’t understand,” Loki says, furrowing his brows and shaking his head. “None of this makes sense.”

Throg shrugs, offering no further explanation. “I told you everything you need to know.”

The none answer only serves to drive away Loki’s shock altogether as anger kicks in. “You told me _nothing_. You said nothing! I asked you why you were confined to this cell and you tell me some nonsense about you being a monster. As if that would be reason enough for father to confine you!”

Thor says nothing, but his frame goes perfectly, eerily still. Were Loki still using the rational and diplomatic parts of his mind, he would back track quickly. Offer a honied tone and false apologies to try and get Thor to open up to him. But all reasoning is lost, and Loki cannot see the danger he’s put himself in. So he carries on.

“What did you do to end up in here? Tell me!”

“…No.”

Loki stares, dumbstruck. “What do you mean ‘no’?”

“It means exactly what you think it means, Loki,” Thor says through gritted teeth, gaze still fixed on the floor as his hands ball into fists. 

The dark-haired god taps Gungnir down firmly and barks, “I, Loki, King of Asgard, command you to answer me. Now.”

Thor moves finally and stalks over to the barrier as he spits out. ”You come down here to, what? Sate your own childish needs? Play pretend that you are a king? You claim to be a ruler but I see what you really are… You’re a spoiled, arrogant brat who’s used to getting his own way. Never having to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

“You wish to know the whole story, _Highness_? You want to know the real reason the All-Father tossed me into this den and threw away the key? Then go figure it out yourself,” Thor snarls, turning away sharply. “We’re done here.”

“ _No_ ,” says Loki sharply, snapping out of his stupefied state and tapping Gungnir harshly on the floor. “No, I think not. This conversation is _far_ from over, Thor. You’re down here for a reason and I demand to know–”

The sudden and deafening sound of thunder echoes throughout the chamber, shaking the foundation of the cell in its intensity. It shuts Loki’s goading down immediately as the God of Thunder rears back around, eyes glowing like lightning in a spectacular yet frightening display of anger.

“GET. OUT.” Thor roars, sparks of electricity dancing over his skin like coiling snakes waiting to lash out.

Terrified by the sudden change in the older man, Loki stumbles to back away from his irate older brother. WIthout looking back, the God of Mischief flees from the cell, missing the way Thor’s eyes stop glowing at the sight of Loki’s face, close to tears, the thunderer’s shoulders slumping with shame. Not seeing how the other man watches the spot where Loki was standing and sighs, twisting himself away and falling heavily back onto his cot with his face in his hands. 

Loki’s breath comes out in sharp pants as he hurries up the steps, mind blank of all thought except escape. He reaches the top of the stairs quicker than when he had first decened them, and bursts through the double doors. They slam behind him as he braces himself against the nearest wall, staff falling from his hand to clang to the ground. Loki slides to the floor as his knees finally give out, torch rolling away from his other hand as his trembling fingers release it and the magic that had kept it alight fades.

“Why…” he murmurs to himself, not even aware that he is crying even as a tear slips down his nose. “ _Why_?”

All he receives in reply are the sounds of his own choked sobs echoing in the darkness around him.

 

***

If Odin were awake, he would be the first person Loki would pay a visit to after he collected himself from his encounter in the dungeons. But the All-Father still slumbers. While mother… she waits by his side, diligent and fretting, putting on a brave face for the kingdom and her son while inside she carries the burden of her fears. Loki finds he has not the heart to confront her while she worries so deeply for her husband’s health. Which leads him to the next person he knows for absolute certain is aware of what he discovered down in the West Wing.

“Heimdall!”

The Gatekeeper stands at the end of the Bifrost, impassive as always, though this time he isn't facing the stars. He’s watching Loki storm towards him, the young king’s chest heaving in equal parts anger and exertion.

“So you found him,” Heimdall says. While his expression never wavers, his tone sounds almost pitying. It only serves to make Loki angrier.

“ _Oh yes_ ,” Loki snarls, shoving past the taller man to start walking about the dome in angry steps. “I found him, alright. My dearly departed older _brother_. But not so dear and departed now, is he?”

“ _Peace_ , my King,” soothes Heimdall, holding up a hand in a placiting manner.

“And this truth was _kept_ from me,” Loki hisses, pacing violently back and forth. “In all this time, you never thought to tell me that my brother still _lives_?”

“I did my best to warn you, Loki,” says Heimdall calmly, eyes still infuriatingly blank of any emotion. “I tried to tell you not to go looking for things you simply weren’t ready to see.”

Loki ceases his pacing, hunching over and pushing his fingers through his hair, twisting the locks in a vain effort to ground himself. Of all the answers he had hoped to learn in the dungeons, finding out that Thor was alive certainly wasn’t one of them. But the knowledge that certain people knew all along… Loki forces back a newer, fresher wave of anger. Hands falling to his side as he sneers.

“Father knew, too…”

“Yes,” Heimdall answers after a beat. “You already know that he does.”

“Who else knows about this?” Loki asks icily, advancing with an edge of hysteria in his voice. “Who else?! Volstagg? Hogun? _Mother_?”

“No one,” answers the Gatekeeper with patience that only makes Loki feel like a small child being talked down to by an adult who seeks to placate him, and _Norns_ is he getting sick of that. “Just your father and myself. And now you, as well.”

Green eyes fall shut in hearing what has perhaps been the only piece of not terrible news he’s discovered today. At least now he knows nobody else had been deceiving him. But even that…

“So they also think him dead?” Loki asks in a voice barely above a whisper, the mere thought twisting his insides until he feels like vomiting.

Heimdall nods once, slow. “As I said… nobody else besides us know of Thor’s true status. And it must remain that way. For the sake of Asgard, Thor must remain confined to the dungeons for as long as he lives.”

“Why is he down there Heimdall?” Loki asks miserably, hands balled at his sides. “What crimes did he commit to be treated like this… like a criminal of war as opposed to the war hero we were always told he was?”

“From what I saw when I glimpsed your meeting in the dungeons, it appeared that he told you to find that out for yourself.”

“Which is why I’m here,” Loki snaps, eyes shining with unshed tears as he points an accusing finger at the Gatekeeper. “You were my brother’s _best friend_. His closest confidant. How could you tell me that my brother was dead knowing full well that was a lie?”

Heimdall’s face falls at last, shoulders slumping as he turns from the young king and heaves a heavy sigh. “As I have told you many times before, Loki… I am sworn to obey your father. It is not my place to supersede the wishes and commands of the King of Asgard. No matter how painful those secrets are to keep.”

The rawness Loki hears in Heimdall’s reply softens his ire, if only minutely. He’s never heard the Gatekeeper express himself in such a vulnerable way and it’s a testament to how much this secret has burdened him. Stepping back with forced breath, Loki lets out a defeated sigh.

“I am your King now, am I not?” 

Heimdall looks back to him again, expression the closest to regretful Loki’s ever witnessed. “Yes, Your Highness. But as long as Odin lives, it is not my place to reveal his dealings with your brother. Not even to you.”

Loki says nothing to that, his anger mixed with something akin to grief. Only now he’s grieving a man who he knows still lives. Worse yet, he’s mourning the father, who for whatever reason, kept this from him.

“If I could free your brother from his fate…” Heimdall offers suddenly, softly. “I would have done so years ago without hesitation. But there is nothing I can do to help Thor, My Prince.”

Neither of them speak for a moment. Then Loki stands straighter, wiping his eyes completely dry, frowning at the ground as he addresses Heimdall firmly. “Even if you won’t tell me what happened to Thor, I _will_ find out on my own.”

“I cannot stop you from trying to find answers, Loki,” the other man replies carefully. “But I must ask that you never share this knowledge with anyone.” 

He already knows the answer, but still Loki finds himself asking, “Not even mother?”

Heimdalls gaze is steady, but unhappy. “Especially not her… Not yet.”

“If not now, _when_?” Loki presses emphatically.

A beat passes, with Loki staring into the deep gold of the Gatekeeper’s unwavering gaze. Then Heimdall extends a hand and grips Loki firmly on the shoulder, a gesture which startles the slighter man.

“When the time is right, Your Highness,” Heimdall finally replies, “You will know.”

Unhanding the king, Heimdall turns his all-seeing eyes back to the universe beyond. Loki stays where he is for a time, allowing himself a moment to steady himself before he resolved to return to the palace. 

Just as the younger man makes to leave the dome, Heimdall calls to him, “Go to your brother again, Loki.”

Loki stops then turns, letting out a half hearted snort. “You saw how well our first meeting went, did you not?”

“I did.”

“Then you know he made it very clear that he no longer wishes to see me…” Loki says dejectedly.

“He never said that, my King,” Heimdall says, tone conspiratorial and light. “He asked you to leave. He never told you you could not come back.”

That statement makes Loki arch a quizzical brow. Why was Heimdall so interested in him returning to see Thor after attempting to stop them from ever meeting?

The Gatekeeper continues. “He does wish to see you again. Very much.”

Loki feels a hopeful pang in his chest at that. But the stubborn, somewhat practical part of his mind firmly shuts it down with a scoff as he starts walking away. “As if that brutish idiot would ever want anything to do with a so-called brat like me.”

Heimdall doesn’t immediately respond to that. It isn’t until Loki is out of earshot that he looks over his shoulder to watch the young man stalk off with a small, knowing hum.

“You would be surprised.”


	6. The Curse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another night, another dream. And another visit to the West Wing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm glad that some of you have noted the "Beauty and the Beast" undertones in this story. It was deliberate. I was aiming to make this feel like a fairytale of sorts, so I hope that's coming through in some way.
> 
> Thank you again for the feedback and I hope you enjoy the new chapter!

_Blood stands in stark contrast to the white backdrop of snow. It is everywhere in these dark days. It runs like rivers in the kingdom of Jotunheim, through valleys and mountains alike. It does not favor Aesir nor Jotun, trailing over both in equal measure, flowing in between the bodies left behind. The aftermath of a final, gruesome standoff. But Asgard reaps the benefits._

_In the distance stands a single temple, a holy place in the ruins of Jotunheim. Untouched by the slaughter. Untainted by death. It’s empty, or so it seems, as a small segment of Asgard’s army draws near, its Crown Prince leading the way._

_There’s merriment from a few, high on the bloodlust of war, reeling in the victorious spoils they have plundered from Jotunheim’s castle and its villages. Thor is tired and tense, but carries himself with confidant swagger. His dirt and blood streaked golden locks falling over his eyes, mouth thinning in disgust as he looks up at the lone structure spared by his realm’s wrath._

_Even this great temple, they discover, is as cold and unwelcoming as the rest of this forsaken planet. Though Thor has no regard for it, he wishes no harm to it. The other men, behind him feel differently._

_“Your Highness,” calls one of the soldiers. “Let us go forward into the temple! Surely there are riches within that the All-Father would have use of!”_

_Not for the first time this day does Thor wish he were in the company of Volstagg or Hogun instead, looking to them to calm the fervor. It’s only feeding into his own admittedly vicious appetites. “My father’s orders for us are to find the Casket of Ancient Winters, not to vandalize sacred landmarks.”_

_“But what if the beasts have hidden it in there, My Prince?” One of the other men inquires. “There’s no telling what those monsters would do to keep that casket from us.”_

_“Indeed, Highness,” chimes in another. “Surely it would not hurt to look?”_

_Thor doesn’t answer, ears catching a faint, but familiar sound. He holds his hammer above his head and motions for the soldiers to be silent as he steps towards the temple._

_“Listen,” he says. Frowning as the sound grows in volume. “That noise. It sounds like-”_

***

Loki’s eyes blink open as he awakens, the dream that took him from an otherwise undisturbed sleep now foggy and dim, though parts of it still lingered. The little he can remember from itis being in Jotunheim. He recalled seeing Asir clash with frost giants, recalled vague vivid images of the dead laying forgotten in the realm of eternal ice. He also recalled Thor, a younger, brasher Thor leading his army into the city. And then…

Pressing a hand to his head as he struggles to remember more, Loki sits up gingerly. It’s there in his mind but for a moment before consciousness erases it. All the while Loki feels something within him pulling him downwards. Down below the dungeons. Down to where the subject of his dreams resides in the darkness, in solitude.

Without another word, Loki pushes aside his sheets and pulls himself from his bed. He throws on his boots before he grabs Gungnir, then heads out swiftly into the dark, empty hallways of the palace. He already knows exactly where he needs to go.

“Loki?”

The temporary King of Asgard startles at the sound of the All-Mother’s voice, spinning around to see her coming up behind him. She seems tired, no doubt the result of watching over his father almost unceasingly. Her eyes are full of concern, and perhaps a bit of sternness there, too. It’s a look that means she is worried. And she is ready to scold him for it.

_Oh Hel._

“Mother,” He says, forcing a smile. “Is everything alright?”

Frigga gives him an astonished stare. “You hardly spoke three words to anyone yesterday barely had a bite to eat at dinner, and retired to your bedchambers early, and yet you’re asking after me as though _I’m_ the one who is out of sorts?”

Loki doesn’t deny it, instead he glances away. “I am sorry I worried you, Mother.”

“Loki,” Frigga presses, furrowing her brows. “What has caused you to be so out of countenance?”

“I was merely…” Loki stops himself, then pauses and starts again. “I was preoccupied with matters concerning the realm. That is all.”

Loki feels his mother’s hands cup his cheeks, redirecting him to look at her as she sighs, “My dear, you must take heed. I know this is a difficult time for you. For all of us. But you must try and take better care of yourself.”

“ _Difficult_ is an understatement,” Loki remarks quietly. Then he moves his hand over his mother’s, removing them from his face and masking his frustration with what he hopes is convincingly composed. “Do not worry yourself for me, Mother. I am simply reading up on everything Father never had a chance to consult with me about. It’s been… quite the task.”

“You do not have to do it alone,” Frigga reassures softly. “I cannot make decisions on how to rule for you, but please know that you may come to me for anything that troubles you. I am always her to lend my aid.”

Loki’s mouth tilts up, despite the knot forming in his stomach, “Are you offering as the Queen Mother or simply as my Mother?”

“Can it not be both?” Frigga inquires, laying a hand on his arm. “I’m serious, darling. If there is something weighing on your mind, I am always here to offer my counsel. And to look after my sweet son.”

Loki cannot bring himself to look into her eyes any longer, but doesn’t risk arousing further suspicion by glancing aside. The smile on his own face threatens to break even as he nods and whispers, “Thank you.”

Frigga smiles once more, hesitation still evident in her manner. Then to his relief, she turns and heads back down the hallway, leaving Loki to stare after her. The smile on his face falls as guilt rises within him.

_You’re wrong, for once,_ he muses. _I must, in fact, be forced to face some things alone._

***

This time when Loki breeches the imposing doors to the West Wing, he doesn’t have to fight the magic that guards it. Instead it yields to Gungnir’s touch immediately, allowing the God of Mischief to pass through unhindered.

Truth be told, Loki isn’t entirely certain this is a good idea. Heimdall’s reassurances of Thor’s wishes aside, his brother’s temper was something he had found quite frightening. He had heard of his bouts of anger from stories before, yes. But what he saw in the dungeons… it was beyond something as simple as a temper tantrum. It was darker. More sinister.

In what seems like no time, Loki reaches the bottom of the spiraling stairs and steps once more into the chamber beyond. This time, he immediately lights the room up with small floating orbs of light. The sudden appearance of the lights causes the occupant of the chamber’s sole prison cell to jump up in his cot, staring dumbly at the display of magic before him. Then his eyes catch sight of their creator.

“…Loki?” Thor stands, the chains clinking and rolling behind as he stops just short of the barrier. He looks so stunned and hopeful that Loki cannot help but feel slightly endeared. Thor speaks again, almost uncertain. “You came back.”

“I did,” Loki says, eyeing Thor from halfway across the room, not ready to move closer just yet.

Thor shifts, hesitating. “Are you… Are you staying?”

“That depends,” Loki answers, eyes narrowing. “Are you going to try and control your temper this time?”

Thor has the decency to look abashed, turning away with a tiny but visible nod. 

Somewhat appeased, Loki walks further into the room. “Then yes. I am staying. For a little while, at least.”

“Ah…”

An awkward silence follows after, causing Loki’s eyes to dart around the space between himself and Thor. He’s still pondering on weather or not he should speak when Thor coughs, grabbing his attention.

“Look. About what happened-,” the thunderer starts, scratching his beard with one hand while the other rubs through his shorn hair, eyes unable to reach Loki’s just yet. “For my behavior the last time you were here…”

Loki frowns. “You mean when you threatened to electrocute me for asking you why you were locked up?”

“I was not going to harm you!” Thor says quickly. The expression on Loki’s face is decidedly unimpressed. Thor fumbles on. “What I meant to say is, even if I wished to I cannot so long as I’m in these cuffs. Not that it makes it any better or that it didn’t scare you-“

“I wasn’t scared,” Loki lies.

“Really?” Thor asks looking up again, brows pinched. “Because you seemed rather afraid of me at the time.”

“I was trying to avoid being the target of your infamous lightning strikes,” Loki snips testily, shifting on his feet. “Was there a point in all of this?”

“What I am trying to say is,” Thor says looking away again, and sighing deeply. “I am sorry.”

Loki doesn’t answer him immediately. He merely observes Thor as the older man bounces anxiously on the balls of his feet. At length Loki huffs, smoothing his hand over his hair and clearing his throat, “Well then… Let's see if you can earn my forgiveness, shall we?”

Thor looks up at that, gaping so comically that Loki nearly chuckles, “Really? I mean, uhm…” A beat. “How?”

“We can start by making up for lost time,” Absently, Loki conjures a small chair before Thor’s cell, settling in and crossing his legs. “You are my brother after all. I should like to get to know you a little better.”

Thor’s mouth closes, face unreadable for a moment. His voice, when he finds it, is small for a god of his magnitude. “…You really mean that?”

Loki rolls his eyes, fighting off a smile. How someone so imposing as Thor could be such a sap at heart? He really was Frigga’s son after all.

“Yes, you great oaf,” Loki chastises lightly. “But on one condition.”

“Name it,” says Thor eagerly.

At that Loki narrows his eyes and cuts to the chase. “Tell me why you are down here. I wish to know everything.”

The answer makes Thor’s face fall in an instant, his eyes darkening slightly. Only this time it is not from anger. This time, it’s from shame.

“I cannot..”

Loki sighs again, rubbing his forehead in frustration, “Whyever _not_? What’s the _worst_ thing that can possibly happen from you telling me? I’m bound to find out sooner rather than later, and you are already locked away in eternal solitude by command of the All-Father. Would you prefer I hear it from him instead of you?”

“ _No_ ,” Thor growls, then holds his hands up apologetically. “No… But I fear that knowing what really happened will make you wish you never knew the truth.”

“Do you really think that I’d run away so easily?” Loki says shortly.

“You did so the last time,” Thor points out.

“Only because you lost your temper,” Loki counters. “I won’t be scared off so long as you keep your calm.”

“You will,” Thor says sounding defeated. “… I’m cursed, after all.”

Loki frowns. “As a someone well versed in all things magical, I advise you to don’t throw around such claims lightly.”

“Well it certainly feels like it,” Thor huffs, pacing back and forth before the barrier.

“Well then,” Loki says standing up and brushing off his tunic. “There is but one way to find out.”

Thor stares uncomprehending as Loki halts just outside at the barrier. He watches as Loki raises his hands up, fingers glowing lightly. 

“What in the Norns are you-?”

“I’m going to attempt to feel for your aura. But I need you to do as I say to ease the process.” 

“My aura?” Thor raises a brow. “Are you a sorcerer or a fortune teller?”

“Unless you want me to walk out of this chamber right now, you’ll shut your mouth _this instant_ and follow my instructions.”

Thor’s mouth shuts with an audible click.

“Now close your eyes.”

Loki waits until Thor does as instructed, watching as the older man closes his eyes. Slowly he begins to extend his magic out, green tendrils of magic creeping of from his fingertips. 

“Relax…”

Carefully, Loki maneuvers the wisps of magic, watching as they pass through the barrier and wrap themselves around Thor, white light rising up around his own body. The thunderer stiffens in shock.

“Don’t open your eyes,” Loki says quickly. “And don’t fight it. I’m not going to hurt you. You just need to try trusting me.”

Thor’s face is still doubtful, but he nods once, less tense than before.

“Good,” Loki says, his tongue peeking out in concentration, but softly laughs as his magic flows easily and unhindered around Thor’s light. “See? And here you thought you were truly-”

Loki’s mirth dies in an instant as the white of Thor’s aura begins to turn black. Then without warning, the black surrounding the other god lunges forward, knocking Loki back onto the ground.

“Loki!” Thor yells, eyes opening immediately, he presses his hands against the barrier as he stares in shock. “Are you alright?”

Breathless and dazed, Loki stares up at the ceiling for a moment. Then at last, he sits up cautiously and clears his throat.

“Well…” He says thoughtfully. “The bad news is this; you _are_ cursed.”

A beat.

“Do you actually mean to imply there’s any _good_ news?” Thor says wonderingly.

“The good news,” Loki continues, standing up and straightening his collar. “Is that I’m going to break it.”


	7. The Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Breaking Thor's curse may prove more difficult than Loki realized.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay everyone. I'm a bit under the weather, but since I'm starting to feel a bit better, I wanted to upload another chapter.
> 
> Thank you for your patience and support and I hope you enjoy!

Being King of Asgard was something Loki always knew would be demanding. If these past few weeks weren’t proof of that enough, with what he was uncovering in Asgard’s dungeons, then the numerous meetings on matters concerning the other eight realms were. Scuffles on Vanaheim between different sections of the population. Disagreements over trade with the dwarves on Nidavellir. Whispers of an ancient artifact hidden by Odin being discovered by the mortals. Asgard may be his kingdom, but Loki learns quickly that when one pledges to watch over all the nine realms, it is a task that must be taken with the greatest of concern and tact.

Arduous as it is, Loki has been prepared from childhood to face such duty, with his father being a very thorough and commanding teacher, and Loki a dutiful, eager pupil. He wasn’t exactly thrilled by the lack of agency and choice his role as Crown prince presented, but he did enjoy learning the ins and outs of politics. What he learned most from Odin, however, was just how alone he was when it came to ruling.

He was not without aid, though ultimate decisions rested squarely on his shoulders. The elders were numerous, as were their views, but from a young age, Loki had learned to navigate their opinions and motivations. Frigga, when not waiting at the All-Father’s bedside, was true to her word when she told Loki to seek her counsel. His mother’s advice was different from his father’s but no less wise. What insights she had helped him to navigate the murky and unsettling issues regarding diplomacy.

But of all the expectations laid out before him, Loki finds it is the mundane undertakings that may very well be the worst of it. The tedious amount of paperwork spread haphazardly across his father’s table is impossible to ignore and even less possible to avoid. The trickster god had been mindful of such duties before he took the throne, it seem unending however.Ruling had less to do with action and more to do with writing.

All of this and Loki now faces yet another imposing task, one he never thought he would have to face:he has to find a way to break the curse placed upon Thor. The nature of the curse is not yet clear to Loki, but he felt enough of it when he searched Thor’s aura to understand that it would not be so easily dealt with. 

In truth there are two basic components to undoing curses and neither are as simple as they sound. The first is identifying the point of origin. Who cast this spell? What was its intent? Why was it cast? Loki knows exactly nothing regarding this one’s source and neither, it seems, does Thor. The second component is the condition upon which the curse was made. All curses, no matter how powerful, have a weakness that can be used to undo it. There are always loopholes hidden in the phrasing. The trick is finding the exact point within the incantation that allows for leeway. Once again, Loki knows not of the words used to attack Thor, and the imprisoned former prince remembers nothing of it as well. Loki sighs and rubs his forehead, knowing that of all his duties as king, this one would be his most challenging.

His musing are cut short when a guard enters the room. “Your Highness.”

Loki pauses, eyes glancing up from his books as the guard bows and continues. “Forgive the interruption. Lady Sif and the Warriors Three wish to have an audience with you.”

The announcement comes as a surprise, though he feels he should have been expecting this. Loki had not spoken to them since the day of the coronation. That had been 3 weeks ago… 

The sheer amount of time that has passed since that day makes Loki exhale in wonderment.

The guard, perhaps reading his reaction wrong, awkwardly clears his throat. “Shall I turn them away, or would you have them sent to you, My King?”

“No,” Loki says standing up, happy to stretch his legs for the first time in hours. After twisting his back to work out the soreness lingering there, he makes for the door, passing the guard with a nod. “Thank you. I shall go to them myself.” 

He doesn’t have to walk terribly far before he finds them milling about in the Hall. Sif leans upon a pillar, Hogun standing close by. Both observe Volstagg and Fandral as they converse animatedly with one another. Loki takes a moment to watch them. 

Ever since before he could form true memories, Loki has known Volstagg and Hogun from court. They were famed warriors in their own right, but their feats on Jotunheim coupled with their friendship with Thor have given them a sort of notoriety in Asgard. Loki had admired them in his youth and they, as everyone else, doted on the young prince. They even went so far as to train him personally in hand-to-hand combat, something they firmly believed Thor also would have wanted. Through their tutelage Loki also met their then teenaged protégé, Fandral, and Sif, who was not much older than the prince himself and happy to have found a worthy opponent to learn with. Those were simpler times that Loki momentarily finds himself longing for.

Not for the first time does he feel a sense of wrongness. Lies were something Loki took to with more ease than most would appreciate, but something about concealing Thor’s being alive from two people he had been rather close with still irked at him in a way he wasn’t accustomed to. He may or may not have exaggerated an injury to get out of practice when working under Volstagg, or expressed a sudden interest in Vanaheim’s weapons manufacturing with Hogun only to listen to the man go on an _extraordinarily_ long rant about the proud history of his realm’s bow crafting skills until their training time was up. But never had Loki gone so far as to cover up something about their best comrad, that surely the men who had such faith in the young prince deserved to know.

Shoving aside the unpleasant thoughts and the feelings they brought with them, Loki clears his throat. Four pairs of eyes widen comically as the Warriors Three and Sif stare at Loki before quickly dropping to their knees and bowing their heads in deference to their current king.

“Please, there’s no need for that,” Loki waves lightly, with a sheepish smile. “Rise, my friends.”

“It has been ages, Your Highness!” Volstagg laughs as he straightens up and patting Loki upon the shoulder. “We began to wonder if you’d followed in your father’s steps and fallen asleep too with all the work you’ve been doing.”

Rubbing at the spot where Volstagg pat him gingerly, Loki makes a show of groaning. “Oh, no need to fret on that count. I haven’t been sleeping at all, as of late. There is much to be done that cannot be accomplished all in the light of day.”

None of these are lies, of course, but effective omissions. A part of him notes the looks of disbelief the four shoot him and wants to explain that he may or may not have found a thought to be dead prince in the dungeon. The reasonable side of him brushes away such thoughts as Loki arches a brow. 

“In any event, was there something you needed of me?”

“Well, it’s not exactly a need, per say,” says Volstagg, scratching his beard. “More of a request.”

“A request?” Loki repeats.

“Yes, well we-,” Fandral starts, then stops. “Of course, you have been terribly busy these last few weeks, but perhaps if you could spare some time-”

“We wanted to know if you would like to join us in the arena for some training exercises, Your Highness,” Sid cuts in, succinctly.

The request catches him slightly unawares, and Loki is about to object. That is until an idea crosses his mind. Him sitting alone mulling over stacks of paper was getting him no closer to finding a solution to Thor’s curse. He needed to investigate further, and who better to help him understand what Thor himself is not fully aware of than those who knew his brother best?

“Actually…” He considers, fingers idly tapping together as he smiles. “I have been sorely neglecting my training as a fighter in favor of diplomacy. I should be delighted to join you.”

“Excellent!” declares Fandral with a grin every bit as dashing as his warrior’s title.

Sif, however, seems surprised by the acquiescence. “You do us a great honor, but I would think you’d turn us down in favor of other less physical activities. There aren’t any wars you need prepare yourself to fight.”

“No, I’m certain I have seen my fair share of documents today, and norns know they aren’t going away any time soon,” Loki intones, smirking as he adds, “Besides, my Father always taught me that a wise king never courts war, but must always be ready for it.”

“Wise indeed,” Hogun nods approvingly.

“As expected of the All-Father,” Fandral agrees saddling up beside Loki with a flirtatious smile. “And has the present King of Asgard decided upon a training partner?”

“I have,” Loki affirms, secretly delighting in the disappointment on the blonde man’s face as he turns with an earnest expression. “Volstagg, would you do me the honor of sparring against me? For old times sake.”

Volstagg seems momentarily surprised before he nods, beaming, “Of course! But I would have thought you would choose Lady Sif.”

“That’s hardly a fair fight,” Loki says loftily causing Sif to halt.

“Are you implying I’d lose to you so easily?” Sif glares.

“Quiet the reverse,” Loki admits causing the others to laugh. “Moreover, I am in need of at least two objective referees. Who better than you and Hogun?”

At that, even Sif laughs as Fandral pulls a face. “Your words and their implications, Loki… They wound me deeply.”

The walk to the courtyard where the soldiers train takes but a few minutes. It’s an oval stadium, in its center a large fenced in stretch of dirt. There is an armory located on one end, and a stable for horses on the other. Perfect for hosting tournaments and other such activities, when it’s not being used for sparring practices. Loki is familiar with these grounds but it’s been nearly a month since he’s visited this place. This was an arena that best displayed brute strength, but Loki never took to such techniques the way most warriors do. It never stopped him from adapting and using his own skills to best Asgard’s finest. 

Loki follows Sif and Hogun into the armory as they go to retrieve protection for the two competitors. The trickster wastes no time as he heads directly for the knife sets hanging on the wall nearest to the stables. Volstagg, unsurprisingly, favors the ax collection, choosing the largest on display.

Fandral perches himself on one of the benches closest to the fence and leans back with an intrigued grin. “It’s rare to see you two fight one another, I must say. Should make for quite the spectacle.”

“Come now, Fandral,” Volstagg chides, rolling his shoulders and allowing Hogun to adjust his armor from behind. “Just because Loki’s a little out of practice doesn’t mean he won't put up a good fight.”

“Oh, you mistake my amusement, Volstagg,” Fandral laughs, legs coming up to rest on the fence and his arms crossed behind his head. “I believe it is Loki who has the upper hand in this duel.”

“And how did you arrive to that conclusion?” Sif asks as she fixes Loki’s shin guards, occasionally tapping for the temporary king to move his legs to test their fortitude. “Volstagg has kept up with his training while Loki has been locked away in the castle, sitting through council meetings and overseeing documents. No offense, Your Highness.”

“None taken,” says Loki archly, lifting his knives up so that they may catch the light, fingers testing the tips of the blade to make certain they are sharpened to his liking. “It’s a perfectly fair analysis. I am rather rusty, but I do hope you allow me some credit. There’s more to sparring than simply being able to wield a weapon.”

“Right,” Sif says standing up and brushing off dirt from her breeches and placing a hand on her hip as she looks between Vostagg and Loki. “Just a quick review the rules before you two go at one another. One, no magic. This is a fight of physical endurance only.”

Loki shrugs as she shoots a questioning glance at him. Normally in duels past, he was permitted to use his sorcery. But in cases like this where the idea was to test durability with weapons alone, the use of magic negated the point.

“Two,” Sif continues. “No cheating. Either physically or verbally. Any punching, biting, kicks, and so on to sensitive anatomy will result in the offender’s loss. The same applies for personal insults or threats.” She smirks a little adding. “Friendly banter between comrades, however, is acceptable and encouraged.” 

“And what would a match between friends be without a little fun at one another’s expense?” Fandral calls over jovilly.

“Quite boring, I should think,” Loki answers watching Sif and Hogun step out of the arena. The lone female of the group knocks aside Fandral's feet so that they fall off the fence and hops up to sit in their place.

“Fighters take your positions!” Hogun calls out.

Loki poises himself on one end of the court, knives drawn and held defensively before him. Volstagg hefts his ax from over his shoulder and into his hands with a grin.

“Just a fair warning, Loki! I don’t plan on going easy on you now that you are King!” says the eldest of the Warriors Three.

The trickster’s mouth tilts in answer. “I would never ask you to.”

Sif raises a hand and yells, “Begin!”

With a battle cry, Volstagg charges first, raising the ax above his head as though it were as light as leaf and swinging it down towards Loki full force. The younger man jumps away in the nick of time, a large dent appearing in the dirt where the blade struck. He draws back and waits to avoid the next swing.

It’s surprisingly easy for Loki to fall back into the patterns of his earlier years. The training is very much as he remembers, Volstagg advancing and Loki retreating. The king starts jabbing his knives every time the ax hits the ground, only stepping away when Volstagg lifts it.

It goes like this for minutes, before Loki reminds himself why he wanted to take on Volstagg in the first place. The wheels are already turning in his mind before he decides to make light conversation.

“Tell me,” Loki says in between jabs, panting from exertion. “Did you and my brother train as thus?”

Volstagg seems thrown off by the question, just missing one of Loki’s knives as the slighter man aims it for his head. He rights himself quickly enough to answer, “Of course. Thor was always eager and willing to demonstrate his prowess. On and off the field of battle.”

“He was a fine warrior, as I understand it,” Loki huffs, slightly out of breath from running. “But like all warriors, I would imagine he must of had some weaknesses.”

Vostagg’s breathing is heavier as well, but he nods, “Aye, that he most certainly did. Very quick to act, Thor was. The opposite of yourself, in that regard. It was a rarity for him to wait for the opponent to attack first. He always liked to start a fight because he knew damn well he would also be the one to end it.”

“How did that work for him?” Loki asks as he throws one of his knives in Volstagg’s direction.

The older man blocks the knife, knocking it aside with his blade with a breathless laugh as he watches Loki make haste to retrieve it.“Well, he wasn’t one of Asgard’s greatest warriors for nothing. Quite the accomplishment considering he was younger than you are now. But that wasn’t to say his impulsiveness always worked to his advantage.”

“Thor would have disagreed,” Hogun calls out, from the side with a hint of smile behind his stoic features.

“What of his temperament?” Loki inquires, again dogging the swing of the great ax, and retaliating with both knives back in his grasp.

Volstagg avoids the blow quickly, frowning in puzzlement as he rallies with a left swing, then a right. “I’m not sure I follow. “

“Well,” Loki side steps each swing, narrowly missing the blows. “From stories my mother has shared with me, it sounds as if my brother had a temper. Did that affect him as well?”

“Sometimes, perhaps,” Volstagg says, puzzling. “But in the midst of war, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for anyone but the enemy. He was quite the sight to behold when he fought with us on Jotunheim… I almost felt sorry for the giants that were foolish enough to try and take him on.”

“Sounds as though you were afraid of him,” Loki says, trying to sound casual even as he feels himself begin to tire. He really was out of practice.

“Perhaps a little,” admits Volstagg, panting now as well. “We certainly had nothing to fear from him, but… he was, at times, intimidating. Why the sudden interest in Thor’s fighting style, Your Highness?”

“No reason,” Loki lies smoothly, jumping aside from yet another impressive drop of the giant ax. “I simply seek to know what his practices were like. Perhaps they may help to improve my own.”

Before Volstagg can respond, Loki catches him off guard with a sliding kick that knocks him heavily onto his back. Before the larger man can get his bearings, Loki swings himself over to kneel above his head, knives pointed directly over his throat. He doesn’t bother to hide the triumphant little smile on his face as Volstagg holds his hands up.

“I yield,” he pants, head falling back to the ground as Loki straightens and backs away, offering a hand out to help Volstagg stand back up. The former tutor pats his one time student on the back in a show of winded good-will. “Very good, Your Highness.”

“Hah!” Fandral cheers, clapping from the stands. “Well done, Loki!”

“Not bad,” Hogun nods as Loki bows to his audience of four with a flourish. 

“Another go, My King?” Sif asks, already swinging her own sword in her hand, as she hops down from the fence.

“Thank you, but no,” Loki says quickly, eager to return to the palace to write down what he had just gathered. “I just remembered I had some urgent business to attend to. Perhaps another time.”

“As you wish, Your Highness,” says Sif with a bow, turning instead to challenge Hogun.

With a final regard to Volstagg, Loki leaves the arena and heads swiftly back to the palace. He doesn’t make it far, however, as he hears someone jogging up behind him.

“Loki?” Fandral’s voice gives him pause as he turns to see a slight frown upon the blonde’s usually cheerful face. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, of course,” says Loki masking his discomfort with a little smile. “Why do you ask?”

Fandral says nothing for a long time before he steps closer and sighs. “You’ve always been good at lying to others when it suits you. I mean no offense,” he adds as Loki opens his mouth to object, “I only say this out of concern. I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re trying to keep something from us. And lately, you seem out of sorts.”

Loki averts his eyes, feeling strangely exposed by the observation. He just wants nothing more than to run back down to the dungeons and see the one person who hasn’t been far from his thoughts since he last saw him. Instead he’s rooted to the spot and trying to find an out to take so that this prying will end.

“Is it because of your father?” Fandral asks quietly.

Sensing the opportunity to drop this conversation quickly, Loki nods. “Yes. In part.”

He feels a hand upon his shoulder and looks back up to see Fandral offering a reassuring smile. “He’ll awaken soon, Loki. In the meantime, his kingdom is in very capable hands.”

“You’re just saying that to win me over,” Loki says lightly.

“Perhaps a little,” Fandral says with a smile. “But truly, all of us think so. And we are here should you need our aid.”

Feeling touched in spite of himself, Loki nods. “I shall bear that in mind. Thank you for your concern and kind words, Fandral. If you’ll please excuse me, though…”

“Of course,” Fandral says, releasing his shoulder with a bow, before he turns back to rejoin the others.

Loki waits until the youngest of the Warrior’s Three is out of site before letting out a sigh of relief. Then without another thought, he hurries back to the palace.

 

***

It has become something of a nightly routine for Loki to sneak away to the West Wing of the dungeons. Waiting for most of the castle to fall asleep is the difficult part. Going beyond the doors that concealed Thor’s chamber are now easier than ever to access, something Loki finds puzzling given how powerful the barriers are. He no longer even needs his father’s staff to accompany him. The doors simply yield to him. Loki waves if off as one of the benefits to being King of Asgard.

When Loki arrives at the bottom of the staircase, Thor greets him from his cot with a tired smile, chains clinking as he sits up. “Back again, Highness.”

“You expected otherwise?” Loki aks as he approaches.

“Maybe. Am I really so boring to you that you prefer the company of stories?” Thor counters, eying the stack of books Loki drops to the floor in front of his cell.

Loki rolls his eyes. “You lack their extensive knowledge and vocabulary, I grant you. But that is not why I brought them.”

“‘The Science of the Forbidden Arts’,” Thor reads aloud, staring at the book on the top of the pile. Then he looks up to Loki questioningly. “Are these-?”

“Research,” Loki says, taking a seat in a chair he conjures next to the books. “For breaking your curse.”

Thor shakes his head in disbelief. “I told you not to bother.”

“And I told you I’m the King of Asgard,” the trickster dismisses, picking up the first couple of books and setting them on his lap. “I do what I want, not as I’m told.”

“You really think you’ll find the answers you’re looking for in those, though?”

“It’s certainly worth a try,” says Loki patiently, before he uses his free hand to magic another couple of books into the air. Then with a snap of his fingers the books vanish only to reappear above Thor’s head. 

The Thunderer only just manages to catch the books clumsily as Loki snaps his fingers again and they plummet down. “Hey!”

“What? You really didn’t think I would break this curse for you without asking for your aid?”

Thor frowns a little, then stares down at the books with a strange expression. “How did you get these in here?”

“… Seidr?” says Loki slowly as if the answer was obvious.

“No, no, I mean-” Thor gestures at the barrier with a sloppy hand wave. “Through that- how did you get those in here so easily with that barrier still in place?”

“I believe I already answered that question,” says Loki with a bewildered little laugh. “It’s not as though that field is impenetrable.”

Neither say anything for a few moments as Loki busies himself with reading. Then Thor takes a seat at his cot and beginning to flick through the first book in his hands.

“You truly are amazing.”

Loki’s face heats, but he ignores the compliment and continues to scan over the pages, hiding a smile behind the binding of his book.

It may have been hours, perhaps minutes, but eventually Loki glances up after reading his second book to catch Thor slumping forward from his cot, eyes closing from fatigue. 

“Thor?” 

Jolting at the sound of his name, Thor blinks and coughs. “Yes, hello! Was there something you need?”

Loki just stares at him a moment before he sighs.

“You can sleep, if you need to,” says the younger Prince not unkindly. “You looked tired even when I first arrived.”

Thor waves a hand in dismissal and shakes his head. “I’d much rather stay awake, to be honest.”

“I don’t mind, really-“

“No!” snaps Thor, quickly lowering his voice when he sees Loki’s reaction to the outburst. He exhales, rubbing a hand over his eyes and explaining. “It’s… it’s just- I tend to sleep rather restlessly.”

Loki shuts the book in his hand and sets it aside, watching Thor carefully. “I take it it’s not just your lack of accommodations that disturbs your rest.”

“You would be right…”

A pause follows before Loki shifts in his chair and asks, “What troubles you, then?”

Thor shakes, lowering his head. “I would not wish to burden you with such trivial matters, Loki-”

“Why not?” presses Loki. “I thought that’s what family was for. We are brothers, after all.”

“Are we though?” Thor asks curiously, not bothering to glance up. 

Loki feels a stab of hurt in the inquiry, turning away so as not to let Thor see how negatively that affects him. “Does it really irk you so much to have me for a brother?”

Thor stays quiet a moment, shifting almost guiltily under Loki’s inquiry. “Nothing about you irks me… even if you do have the tendency to be a bit of a brat.”

The joke at the end does little to comfort the younger man, something Thor must sense as he adds, “It’s not that I don’t acknowledge you as family. Only that it’s been so long since I could have that back in my life. It is… strange, I suppose.”

Loki sighs, his feelings stinging, but still focusing on his brother. “I only wish to help you, Thor. Can you not at least let me _try_ to be a dutiful younger sibling?”

There is a pause before Thor nods his consent, clearing his throat awkwardly, still not meeting Loki’s eyes. “Of course... If it's all the same to you, though, I need time before I can return the sentiment.”

“All right then,” Loki smoothly answers, stubbornly ignoring the dull ache the statement prods within him. “I’m listening.”

Thor shifts, clearly pondering how to begin. “… When I sleep, I tend to suffer from dreams. Nightmares, to put it plainly.”

“You are not alone in those… ,” Loki says quietly before biting his lip to reprimand himself, allowing Thor to finish his thought.

“I have been plagued by such dreams since I was child,” Thor continues, shrugging lightly, settling again onto his cot, leaning back onto wall. “They accompanied me to bed so often that I… well. I simply grew to accept them as being a part of me.”

Loki frowns, puzzled by such an admission, approaching the barrier of the cell slowly. “Do you truly mean to say… you’ve never experienced a good night’s sleep? Not _ever_ in your entire life?”

“I would not say my _entire_ life,” says Thor slowly, eyes looking away from Loki’s and finding something on the wall suddenly fascinating. “It’s only when I was locked away in this cage that they grew more and more frequent.”

He doesn’t offer anything further, but Loki can sense more in this story that Thor isn’t saying. Softly he inquires, “You said you experienced these nightmares in your youth as well. Something must have kept them at bay?”

He receives no answer, at first, and Loki waits a long while before Thor finally sighs, one arm unfolding to run through this shorn head. 

“It was her magic… Frigga’s magic. Our mother-” Thor’s voice cracks, both of his hands coming up to scrub furiously at his face, but even the dimness of the torch light does a poor job in masking the tears that threaten to fall from his face.

Loki feels his chest grow tight with a sympathetic yearning to embrace his older brother. Never in all the times he’s visited Thor have they ever broached the topic of the All-Mother, and now Loki can understand why. The very thought of being kept away from her… it wasn’t something Loki could _bear_ to imagine.

Thor collects himself, clearing his throat. “She… she always sang to me as a child. It somehow put me to sleep. It wasn’t just a lullaby, though. It- it was a spell, one meant to enchant me into a sleep without nightmare. I didn’t know it then, but I understand now.”

“What did she sing to you?” asks Loki. “Can you remember the song?”

Thor stares quietly at the floor before shutting his eyes and willing himself to remember. Then Loki hears him hum. Low, but clear. It’s a familiar song*, one Frigga sang to Loki many times in his childhood. He knows the tune well enough to start softly singing the words himself. Thor stops humming immediately, falling almost into a trance, enthralled by the lullaby that had so many years before enchanted him. Without once coming out of his blissful half-conscious state, Thor slowly lays down upon the cot, body curling into itself almost like a small child, drifting off to the sound of the younger man’s melodic tenor.

Loki doesn’t stop singing until he hears loud snoring coming from Thor’s cell. Smiling to himself, he carefully gathers his books back and quietly leaves the older man to sleep peacefully in his room. Given how late is and the yawn Loki now feels bubbling up from himself, it’s time he, too, get some rest.

 

***

_“Pray attend to these words, All-Father. You shall have your bastard son bare the burden of becoming the future King. He shall inherit Asgard, watch over the nine realms and all who dwell within them. He shall grow in strength and power befitting of the title ‘God of Thunder.’ All shall serve him loyally and without question. But…”_

_“Hela, don’t-!”_

_Black tendrils knock aside the All-Father, wrapping themselves around the blond toddler. The child screams and cries, trying to escape their hold. All the while, their mistress walks past a stunned Odin, heading straight toward where the boy is being held suspended by her power._

_“A child born of a monster,” she begins thoughtfully, “has no choice but to become one himself. And so shall be his fate. He will grow in arrogance and condescension. Fester in rage and temper as sudden and untamable as the storms he will create. He will crave war. Court it incessantly. Just as his father before him had done… As you shall_ inevitably _do again,_ Odin _.”_

_Hela pauses, glancing over her shoulder with a smirk as Odin sits up slowly. Then she redirects her attention to the squirming, weeping boy._

_“And thus when he does at last find a war to thrust himself into, as he baths in the bloodshed and havoc he’ll wreck, he will begin to become less of a man. Piece by piece, he’ll lose it all. His humility. His compassion. His mind. His_ love _.”_

_One long green nail reaches out to trace the whimpering, sobbing boy’s cheek._

_“Until all that is left is a mindless, brainless beast, insatiable in his appetite for chaos and destruction. He will know nothing of kindness, never recall joy or happiness. His will be a life of lonesome suffering…” Hela trails off, drawing her hand back with a strange softness in her tone. “For who can truly come to love something that should never have been born?”_

_“Hela…_ please _,” Odin says, his voice cracking as he begs, struggling to right himself. “He’s my son. Your brother.”_

_The dark-haired woman stares down at the boy a moment, face blank. “I know.”_

_Then she looks back to the All-Father again with a small, mirthless smile._

_“Which is why he never had a chance.”_

_Then she twists around and holds up her hands, eyes glowing._

_“Thor._ Odinson _. God of Thunder… I_ curse _you!”_

***

 

Loki wakes from the dream with a cry. Panting in the darkness as he recalls the horrifying details of this particular nightmare. He’s forgotten many of the important parts of it once more, hissing as he presses his hands to his eyes to keep a hold of what little remains clear to him. He saw Odin pleading with a frightening woman. A woman who was holding captive a child. The child had blond hair and bright blue eyes-

He frowns. Then his mouth parts as realization strikes him.

“These dreams,” he murmurs. “Could they be… Thor’s memories?”

As soon as he even utters the words out loud, Loki tuts at himself, his logic chiming in to dismiss the very notion of it. Surely that was _impossible_. Why on earth would he be dreaming of Thor’s memories? He’s no dreamseer. And while he is certainly capable of peeking into someone else’s mind, it’s an invasive practice that drains the caster of their magic, often traumatizing those enchanted. And that was something he never wanted to do to anyone, let alone Thor. To suddenly share his thoughts in such a way, it simply didn’t make any sense. 

Unless…

Loki’s heart stops as an uneasy feeling suddenly settles in the pit of his stomach. There was only one other explanation for such an occurrence, and if it was true, then it would have to mean-

“… We’ve met before.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * The lullaby Frigga sang is this- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx3xyBMiung
> 
> (And yeah, it mentions "Jesus" in the lyrics, but replace that with "Odin" and I feel it works. It's very beautiful and soothing.)


	8. The Memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor's past is revealed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone. I would like to apologize for not updating in over a week. Work life has interfered with my free time, and the holidays haven't made that any more manageable. I also ran into some issues while trying to upload this, and long story short, the final draft of this particular chapter was accidentally deleted and I had to go with the unedited draft. Perhaps someday I'll go back and revise this a bit.
> 
> Thank you for your patience and I hope you guys enjoy this chapter regardless of my feeling unsatisfied with it.

From the time he was a small child, Loki had learned that dreams carried a power of their own. That it was even possible for one to see the past, present, and future through their dreams. But when it comes to matters relating to premonitions and soothsaying, Loki knows that he is out of his depth. Whatever knowledge he has of these concepts comes solely through extensive reading rather than experience. Much as he loathes to admit it, sorcery of such uncertainty and fickleness cannot be so baselessly delved into. Magic, like any other talent requires constant nurturing and practice. Loki’s was used to illusion and conjuration mostly.

If Thor’s dreams and his are linked, then he would need the help of someone’s whose seidr was more advanced than his own, at least in this particular area. Someone with the wisdom and experience necessary to navigate such uncharted territory. Fortunately, he has access to one of the most powerful and skilled practitioners in the nine realms, a sorcerer whose abilities are surpassed only the All-Father. The unfortunate part, it is the All-Mother.

As he promised Heimdall nearly a month ago, Loki has kept his silence on what he found in the dungeons, but it weighs heavily upon him. If lying to his friends about Thor has been uncomfortable, then lying to Frigga is down right torturous. Seeing her face at meal times and throughout the day after sneaking off to visit his presumably dead brother at night is nearly unbearable. Loki was truly honest with only a few people and even fewer did he trust to see past his own elaborate tricks and tales. If Frigga suspects he is burdened by more than just the crown, then she either trusts that it’s not something to trouble herself over, or more likely is too preoccupied with watching over Odin as his sleep wears on for longer than anyone anticipated.

And now Loki must come to her for aid if he has any hope in helping Thor. It’s not exactly desperation that leads the king to seek his mother out, or so he tells himself. It’s simply the practical choice. Of all his tutors in magic, she was and still is the best. He can think of no other more suited to identifying the link between their dreams than Frigga. The trouble is how will he ask her about dream sharing without rousing suspicions on who his dreams are linked to?

Stopping just outside of his mother’s chambers, Loki lifts a hand to knock against the door. At first he hesitates, wrist hovering just short of the polished gold surface. Then his knuckles tap lightly. Twice at first, too soft for anyone to hear. The he does so again three times, harder. He waits for what feels like an eternity, clearing his throat and adjusting his collar. In actuality, it is a matter of seconds before Frigga answers, opening the door to stare up at her son in surprise.

“Loki?” Frigga blinks. “It is late, why are you not sleeping?”

“Forgive me, Mother,” Loki begins carefully, fingers tapping together out of nervous habit. “There is something I need to speak with you about… Is this a bad time?”

“Of course not, dear. You know that I will always make time for you,” she reassures, smiling as she opens the door wider, stepping aside. “Please come in.”

Nodding his thanks, Loki makes his way past the All-Mother and into her private chambers. He has not stepped foot in his father and mother’s room since he was a child, easily spooked by Fandral’s wild stories of monsters and spirits. Long has he outgrown the days of running to Frigga’s side when nightmares would plague him. But he hasn't yet grown too old to seek her guidance. 

He watches his mother glide across the room in one of her lovely silk robes to sit in front of a large nightstand, and examine herself and him through the looking glass. She picks up a pearl handled brush from the table, having already taken her hair down from it’s usual styled braids and buns.

“What brings you here at this hour, darling?” Frigga asks as she begins to run her brush through her long golden hair, taking care to slowing the stroke over tiny tangles she encounters. “Does something trouble you?”

“No, not exactly,” he starts, moving to sit upon a large wooden chest beside the nightstand, watching as his mother goes about her nightly ritual with a small pang of nostalgia. “I was merely… curious about something. And I believe you can help me where no ancient book can.”

“My, such flattery,” Frigga teases, glancing over at Loki with a smile. “And what is this supposed knowledge I have that not even books carry?”

Feeling bolder than he did when he first gathered enough courage to speak to her, Loki decides to take the chance and come out with it. “What can you tell me about dream sharing?”

The brush stills midway down Frigga’s hair as she raises a brow at her son. “That is quite a curiosity. What brought it about?.”

Loki shrugs, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible, though internally, he’s already berating himself for ever thinking this was a good idea. He dissimulates his unease and carries on. “It came up when I was going through some of father’s notes. In truth, I was never as good of a study in magic relating to this subject. You have always had a better grasp of the concepts of anyone I’ve ever known.”

“Well,” Frigga begins slowly, setting aside the brush. “It’s quite the rare occurrence. Dream sharing is difficult to understand. Even the most skilled of enchanters are befuddled by the mechanisms behind it. What we do know for certain is that they are only present between those with a strong connection to one another.”

“And one must know the person they are bonded to,” he remarks, attention fully on Frigga as she regards him with a tilt of her head. “Is that not so?”

“Yes and no,” she replies thoughtfully, hands folded upon her lap. “While one must have been in the presence of the person they are bound to at least once, it isn’t always necessary to know them in an intimate sense. As a general rule, these spells require some familiarity between the individuals who are linked. Though naturally, there are some exceptions.”

“What kind of exceptions?” Loki presses, leaning forward with his elbows upon his thighs.

Frigga hums, face frowning in deep thought. “Two particularly powerful sorcerers may forge a bond without realizing it… But it is far more commonly observed between soulmates.”

Something twists strangely within the king upon those words, but Loki shakes his head, brushing it aside. “Are you certain there could be no other exceptions to this rule?” Not even between family members?”

The queen doesn’t say anything for a moment, face surprisingly devoid of any reaction, though there’s a question behind her gaze that makes Loki shift a bit. “No… At least not that I am aware of.”

“I see…” he sighs heavily, perplexed and the faintest bit frustrated.

“Loki,” Frigga begins leaning forward to brush a stray hair away from his face. “Does this have something to do with your dreams?”

The color drains from Loki’s face. “What do you mean?“

“You have not been sleeping well for a long time,” Frigga notes quietly. “I saw as much the day of your coronation and I have seen it since.”

This was not where Loki had planned to take their conversation. In hindsight, perhaps he should have prepared for the possibility that in spite of her currently fretting over his father’s health, his mother would have taken notice of his own restless state. His silver tongue seldom fails him in moments like these, but now he feels as if it has rusted.

“Did Thor suffer from nightmares as well?” Loki hears himself ask, almost instantly regretting the slip.

His mother's hand falls from his face with an astonished stare. “How-?”

“I only ask because,” he says quickly to cover his gaffe, ”I was wondering if it was hereditary. If perhaps our family is simply prone to restless nights.”

Something relaxes in Frigga’s expression. She shuts her eyes and nods with a sigh. “Yes. He did. Though… they were far worse than your own.”

“How so?” asks Loki furrowing his brows.

“Ever since he was at least 100 years, Thor suffered from night terrors. The nightmares were terrible enough, but they were not the only things that plagued him. He would take to walking in his sleep. And as he grew older-“ 

The queen suddenly falls silent.

“What happened as he grew, Mother?” Loki probes carefully, eyes fixed on everything his mother’s expression couldn’t quite hide. The pain, the longing. The fear.

“His powers would sometimes overwhelm him. A god with such an element at his disposal can wreak havoc enough when awake, but fast asleep…” Frigga shook her head.

“Nothing could help that child sleep,” she explains tiredly, an old pain crossing her face as she looks out her window. “Not bedtime stories or reading. Potions for sleep were ineffective on him. There was just one way he could ever get a night’s rest.”

Loki waited, already knowing the answer from Thor himself, but wanting to hear his mother confirm it.

“I sang to him,” Frigga says. “It was a simple lullaby, exactly what I would sing to you as a child. But I sang it as a spell. An enchantment meant to soothe and comfort. That alone would be the cure for his restless nights, until-“

“Until he left for Midgard,” Loki finishes for her, his own voice cracking slightly as he observes her pain.

Frigga nods grimly, then seeks to reassure her son with a warn albeit tempered half smile. “But Loki, dearest… Whatever it was that affected your brother so violently, that isn’t what is happening to you.”

“How can you be so sure?” Loki wonders softly.

“Just a simple feeling,” she says. “Mothers know such things.”

Loki cannot bring himself to even smile at the jest. Her insight, while appreciated, does not bring him any closer to helping his brother. Once more, the tapestry of their family’s mysterious past yields little when he attempts to unravel the knots. And at this rate, he’s going to have to tell his mother the truth.

Echoing from his most recent memories, Loki remembers something from his last encounter with Heimdall. “ _When the time is right, Highness, you will know._ ”

Green eyes squeeze shut in resolve. Loki knows deep down that his uncertainty means that now is _definitely_ not the right time to share these truths with Frigga. Not when he isn’t sure how the pieces of this puzzle yet fall into place. But soon…

“Loki,” Frigga ‘s voice pulls him from his thoughts. “Why do you tremble so?”

The king snaps out of his musings to stare down at his arms. He hadn’t even noticed the tremors running through his body in tiny shuddering intervals.

“It… it’s nothing Mother,” he says, forcing back the quiver in his voice and turning to her with a practiced smile. “I’m afraid it’s as you said earlier. I haven’t been sleeping well. Forgive me for taking up so much of your time.”

“Nonsense,” Frigga chides gently, leaning in to kiss his forehead. “I am your mother. You are my son. You can _never_ take up too much of my time.”

Loki stands, pushing a stubborn strand of hair back out of his face as he heads for the door. “It’s late. I should retire. Thank you, Mother.”

“Loki… wait,” Frigga softly calls out behind him.

His hand rests just upon the handle of the doors as he hears her stand and walk closer, approaching him an small measured steps him.

“These dreams of yours,” she starts. “Are you concerned that they are connected to someone else?”

Loki swallows, stealing himself as he glance back over his shoulder to where she stands, expectant. “… No. I don’t believe they are.”

Something akin to disappointment flickers behind the queen’s eyes. She collects herself with a final exhale. Then she whispers, “Whatever it is that is causing you so much distress… even if you feel you must face it alone, will you promise to be careful?”

With another stab of guilt rolling over him, Loki looks away for the last time, unable to make a promise he isn’t certain he can keep. “Goodnight, Mother.”

As soon as Loki shuts the door behind him, he leans against it, head bowed. It seems the All-Mother is more aware of his quiet struggles than the king had feared, and it worries him. He would have to be even more scrupulous going forward. After a moment, the god of mischief pushes himself from the surface of the door, making his way once again back down into the gloom of the dungeons.

***

“I have a theory,” Loki announces as he enters the dome shaped room he has taken to visiting every night.

Thor looks up from the small table he is seated at off on the other side of his cell, across from the cot. Before him is a modest dish of meat and potatoes, and a mug full of what Loki presumes to be water. There also sits half a loaf of bread, though it might have been whole given the large bite taken off at the end. Far finer than anything the other prisoners receive, but still significantly less lavish than the meals Loki enjoys on a daily basis.

“So long as you don’t mind the conversation being a bit one-sided,” Thor says around a mouth full of potatoes.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Loki chides, stopping just a few paces from the barrier. He bestows his brother with a quizzical look, watching as Thor picks some of the boar meat from between his teeth with a piece of bone. “I keep meaning to ask you. How exactly do you continue to get food and drink if no one but our father and Heimdall knows you’re here?”

Thor shrugs, swallowing. “Magic, I imagine. No doubt Odin cast some sort of spell to keep me from going hungry. Every meal time something awaits me at this table. And when I finish, it vanishes.”

The slighter man hums, nodding. It sometimes amazes Loki how often he forgets his father is technically a sorcerer. He’s seen Odin perform complex incantations, but the titles of All-Father and King of Asgard stand at the forefront of what Loki and the rest of the kingdom thinks of him.

“So what is this theory that you have?” Thor asks, taking another large bite of the bread. And watching Loki expectantly.

“A yes. As I was trying to say earlier,”says Loki. “It would appear that your dreams and mine are somehow linked.”

Thor’s hand drops the boar meat it was holding half way from his mouth which is still hanging open. He pushes aside the food, wiping his mouth on the back of his arm, expression still of shock, but also intrigue. “What makes you think that?”

“I keep having nightmares involving a young boy with blond hair and blue eyes. I had it again last night,” Loki says watching Thor shift uncomfortably. “Father was there. And there was also a woman. Dark hair and eyes lighter than mine. She appeared to be placing a curse upon you, but the words of the spell are still fuzzy in my mind.”

“Hela…” whispers Thor.

“You know who she is?” Loki asks, attempting to push down the hope sparking within himself.

“No,” says Thor darkly. “At least I… I don’t think I do. There are moments when I feel as though I should.”

“We will work on that later,” Loki promises. “For now, I think it’s safe to suggest that you and I are sharing the same dreams. And that these dreams are your memories.”

“That’s your theory?” says Thor, tilting his head with a slight frown.

“That is it,” affirms the smaller man, conjuring a couch at the center of the dome and walking over to sit upon it. “But I cannot be sure unless I have definitive proof.”

Thor pushes himself up from the table and grabs his mug, walking back over to his cot and sitting heavily down upon it. “All right. So how do you plan to obtain this proof? Will you ask me to keep a diary of my dreams?”

“Not quite. I thought we’d try another method,” Loki says casually, loosening his collar and stripping off his boots as Thor takes a sip of water. “Tonight I’m going to sleep with you.”

Thor spits out his drink.

At first Loki frowns, annoyed by Thor’s sudden frantic display. Until the realization hits him and causes him to sputter, his face turning red in mortification. 

“I meant that I would sleep outside of the cell while you did the same from within, you fool!” he hisses.

“Y-you could have made your intentions more clear from the start,” Thor stammers defensively.

“I _was_ clear, you’re just an imbecile!” Loki bits back, slapping a hand over his face. Taking in a deep breath, the god of mischief snaps the fingers of his free hand to summon a blanket and a pillow for himself. “Let’s just… try this for a night. We’ll know if this is working if we awaken from the same nightmare together.”

“And if we don’t?” Thor asks. “If one of us awakens while the other slumbers on, what then?”

“Then the one who wakes up first must get the other to wake up as well, naturally.” Loki says, waving his hand absently. 

“Well then,” Thor says, stretching and laying back upon the cot with his hands folded behind his head. “Shall we start?”

Loki gapes. “You’re not suggesting we go to bed now?

“Why not?” Thor shrugs. “The sooner the better, don’t you think?”

“How can you even think to sleep after you just ate?” mutters the younger man dumbfounded, but laying down upon the couch nonetheless. “I don’t recall you being so eager to rest when we last spoke.”

“If you truly shared the same dream that I had last night, then you should understand why I wasn’t too keen on returning to bed after.”

Loki pauses, then pulls the blanket over himself and murmurs. “You’re right… forgive me.”

He is met with silence, at first, making the king wonder if Thor had already fallen asleep. Then the thunderer’s voice rumbles with a soft chuckle.

Loki glances back towards the cell, wondering, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” Thor says fondly, the gruffness of his voice softer in his tired state. “You said our dreams were connected?” 

“Yes. At least I suspect that they are,” Loki says carefully.

“Then we must have met before,” Thor responds around a yawn. “ Or perhaps… we are…”

Whatever else Thor has to says is gone as his breathing evens out. Then moments later, quiet snores fill the chamber indicating that he had fallen asleep, leaving Loki to stare up at the mural upon the ceiling in silence, watching passively at the scenes of Thor’s past play out above him.

Eventually, the younger man feels his own eyes shut from a sudden unexpected wave of drowsiness. His mind lazily tries to fight it, though it eventually submits to the call of sleep.

***

_The sounds of men screaming can be heard all throughout the city as lightning descends upon the icy landscape. It’s a blur of snow and debris and men in armor clamoring to escape the onslaught of what appears to be a brilliant and ominous electrical current focused on striking down everything in its path._

_“Pull back! Pull back!!!”_

_“We cannot fight him!”_

_“Stand your ground! His Highness has gone- AHHHHHHHH!”_

_Another gust of wind and then-_

_All falls silent. A hush falls over the land as Thor, with eyes glowing electric blue and sparks still lingering around his knuckles, steps over the limbs of the fallen. His blood matted golden hair about his face. His teeth bared as he pants not unlike a beast after a hunt. Limbs and innards are strewn beneath his boots as he looks out among the carnage without seeing it._

_Then suddenly a something like recognition appears as the fog of the tempest blows over, his eyes blinking back into their usual color with confusion and disorientation. And then he finally sees the bodies laid out before him… and then down to his hands now dripping a gory red._

_Thor screams, the storm brewing anew as he falls to his knees and howls skyward. Thunder cracks overhead so loud it shakes the ground_ -

***

Loki awakens with a start, the dream fading away all but for one aspect. The sound of thunder that had been so loud that it jolted him from his sleep now echoes throughout the chamber. Green eyes snap over to the cell, rounding in horror as Thor’s body lights up from strange sparks licking up and down his still sleeping form.

“Thor,” Loki calls quickly, sitting up from the couch and watching with rising unease as the God of Thunder begins to toss and turn in his dream state. He tries calling to him again, louder. “Thor, wake up!”

There is no response, and no sign that the prince even heard him in his troubled state. Only now does Loki notice the shackles on Thor’s wrists and ankles glowing, a glinting gold against the white blue lightning still rolling over the God of Thunder’s body. It seems to clash violently with Thor’s power in an effort to suppress it, resulting in ugly red lines zigzagging around Thor’s bound wrists and ankles.

Loki bolts up, all but throwing the blanket away from himself, as he rushes towards the barrier, hands extended. He begins to attack the field separating him from Thor with every spell he knows might work, determined to reach his brother before it is too late. With Thor’s chaotic loss of control affecting the stability of the cell, it allows the trickster to breech it more easily than he should have, all the while yelling out in hopes that Thor would hear him.

“Thor, you have to wake up, please! You’re losing control. You’re going to get yourself killed!”

Without another thought, Loki runs to the cot and presses his hand on one of Thor’s bound wrists, crying out as electrical currents start running over him as well. Gritting his teeth, Loki centers his magic on the shackles. They rattle violently, overwhelmed from the combination of Thor’s powers and Loki’s seidr. Then with a final burst of his own concentrated magic, Loki forces them to fall away from Thor’s hands and feet, yelling to the older god again.

“Wake up!”

With a muted roar, Thor’s eyes open, glowing and staring straight up before they fall upon Loki. He pants, breath a harsh sound in the stillness of the chamber. Then with a growl, Thor hurls himself forward, surprising the younger god and knocking him back. Loki hasn't the time to think of what to do next before instinct kicks in and he ducks the next charge, swinging his legs up to kick Thor in the jaw. While the thunderer is disoriented, Loki jumps back to his feet and kicks him back onto his cot, kneeling over his head with his knife drawn back and his other hand against Thor’s face muttering another spell to break him out of his unconscious state. Thor’s hand comes up to grip at his arm, trying to pull him off before it loses its strength and the glowing in his eyes finally wanes. As Loki's hand falls away, Thor blinks, eyes falling to where his hand still clings to Loki’s arm.

“Loki?!” He pulls away, fumbling on the cot until his back hits the wall, Loki still straddling him. “Y-you shouldn’t be in here! I could have-”

“Killed yourself,” Loki finishes, breathless and furious as he glares at Thor, rubbing the place where Thor’s hand had touched him. “You were fighting those restraints so hard, that you nearly summoned an entire thunderstorm right here in this dungeon.”

Thor doesn’t respond to that. Eyes focused on where Loki gingerly rubs his arm before they fall to his own, unbound and shaking at his sides. His voice comes out small as he whispers, “I could have killed you…”

Sighing, Loki shakes his head. “I’m alright, truly, brother.”

“I could have _killed_ you, Loki,” Thor repeats, stronger now, as he frowns and sits up from the wall, face nearly in Loki’s. “You should have never taken those restraints off of me. Now there’s no telling what I will do without them!”

“Did you not listen to word I said?” Loki snaps back. “Those chains were power limiters of some sort. The more you fight them, the more they fight back! If it hadn’t been for me you could have died.”

“Then you should have let me!” Thor yells back, causing Loki to visibly flinch. Seemingly in shock of his own words, Thor looks away. “I… I’m sorry, Loki. I didn't mean-”

“You better not have,” Loki glares coldly, still shaken by the fight, both physical and verbal.

An awkward silence falls between them as Loki moves away from Thor, watching as his brother sighs.

“Well, if nothing else,” Thor says, mouth tilting upwards ever so slightly. “At least your thesis was proven tonight.”

Loki sniffs, almost smiling, “You expected otherwise?”

“I never doubted you,” Thor says with such certainty that an actual smile graces Loki’s face for a fraction of a second.

“Thor…” says Loki, composing himself, his own memories of the dream vivid and unsettling. He doesn’t wish to address this matter so soon after what transpired. But he has to know. “What happened that day on Jotunheim?”

“I think you’ve seen enough to know the answer to that,” Thor says with no small amount of shame.

“I saw only brief images. I know not what they mean.”

When Thor keeps silent, Loki sighs, and gently lays a hand over the other man’s arm, beseeching him. “Brother, please. I need context for what is happening in these dreams if I am to help you.”

Slowly, still avoiding eye contact and resolutely staring at the wall, Thor speaks, “I… I could show you.”

With a slight furrow of his brows, Loki wonders, “How?”

“The missing painting,” Thor says nodding towards the barrier without looking. “In the mural upon the ceiling… Surely you noticed.”

Loki swallows. “I did… The first time I came down here, actually.”

“This chamber,” Thor says quietly. “It used to be my study. We let most believe that it was an extension of the dungeon, but in truth this was once my private war room. Very few knew of it’s true purpose.”

“It certainly explains why the layout is so much different from the rest of the dungeon,” Loki says. “But I still don’t understand what that has to do with-”

A hand is held up and Loki falls quiet, watching as Thor begins to recount his past. The taller man’s hands clasp behind his back as he takes in a deep breath.

“In my youth, I courted war,” Thor begins, walking past Loki to stand at the edge of the cell and look out past the barrier up to the mural. “It was a hunger akin to a man so starved of nourishment that he would start to go mad. Our Mother did everything in her power to quell that thirst. But father-“ 

Thor stops himself, hands falling to his sides, balling up in anger.

“ _Odin_ , was not so concerned about that. He was more worried about the rebellion happening on Jotunheim, more wary of King Laufey’s ambitions to take back control of his realm. Perhaps take one of the other eight as well. It was a power grab no other enemy had attempted since our grandfather, Bor, fought and defeated the dark elves. All of our advisors swore Laufey was bluffing, talking up threats he would never dare go through with.”

He laughs lowly, shaking his head.

“They were wrong, of course. Very soon thereafter, word reached us… Midgard had been plunged into a so called ‘Age of Ice.’ The mortals, at first, simply thought it to be an unusually long winter. That was, until the frost giants came. The humans were defenseless against the onslaught. Frail, superstitious and frightened beyond measure, they fled the siege rather than stand and fight for themselves. Laufey was all but assured victory.”

“That's when Odin seized his chance to end Laufey’s reign once and for all. Thus at the age of nine hundred and seventy-nine years, my dreams of valor were realized. I was the youngest of three captains assigned to take down the giants. The other two, of course, were Volstagg and Hogun. We were an unstoppable force that drove the Jotun army back until they had no choice but to retreat to their own realm.”

“And then,” Thor shudders. “The day I subcommed to the darkness came. Volstagg and his men were sent to Midgard to aid with their recovery. Hogun’s army returned back to Asgard to ensure its safety until the last of Asgard's protectors came home. But I was tasked with one final mission. Odin sent me to recover the key to the frost giants’ power so that they would never again pose a threat.”

“The Casket of Ancient Winters,” supplies Loki.

“So you know of it,” Thor remarks.

“Everyone in Asgard knows of it,” Loki says quietly. “It’s…”

He stops turning away.

“What?” Thor presses frowning. “What was it you were about to say.”

Loki sighs deeply, hand coming up to rub his head. “According to the stories father told, you died to retrieve the casket. Slaughtered an entire army of Jotun yourself.”

Thor’s laughter suddenly tumbled throughout the chamber, almost making Loki jump. “So that’s how he twisted it? Painted me as the noble warrior who met his death on the battlefield against our sworn enemies before joining the ancestors in Valhalla?”

“I take it that was a lie as well,” Loki intones.

“Oh no, not all of it,” Thor grins, all teeth and not a trace of humor. “As I was saying, I was sent to recover the casket. And as it happens, I _did_ slaughter an entire army on my own. Only… it wasn’t an army from Jötunheim.”

There’s a pregnant pause after Thor’s words. Then Loki’s eyes widen in horror.

“No…”

“Yes,” Thor replies, with a grim smile. 

Suddenly, a lighting bolt erupts from Thor’s body, shooting out of the cell and up into the ceiling. It’s aim blasts at the blank space in the mural before dissipating into sparks. When Loki walks to stand beside Thor, he looks up at the dome again. He gasps, taking a step back as he sees what was previously not shown.

The picture that is revealed is one of Thor rampaging through Asgard’s army, one hand closed over what was perhaps a man’s skull though the gory mess between his fingers, the other summoning lightning bolts down into groups of fleeing soldiers. Suddenly, the images from the dream become clearer again as Loki reaches to touch his shaking head.

“The dream… those bodies were warriors from Asgard,” Loki says, turning to Thor for confirmation.

Slowly, Thor nods. 

“But- But I don’t understand,” breaths Loki, trembling so hard his knees almost knock together. “What happened?”

“We found the casket hidden in the temple at the center of the city. But it wasn’t alone.” Thor’s eyes grow dark. “There were civilians hidden within… mostly the sick. And the young. I knew there were meant to be casualties in war, but to see the remnants of it before my eyes still haunts me till this day.”

Thor’s mouth trembles as he whispers. “But my men… they were not at all moved as I was. Perhaps it was blood lust, maybe even greed. I cannot say for certain, but it matters not what fueled it. They slaughtered the inhabitants on site, cutting down those who tried to flee. And I- I did nothing to stop them. Frozen to the spectacle like a _coward_.“

Loki watches his brother as he spits out the last word, all the while trying to come to grips with what is being said.

“But then I heard the cry of a child,” Thor continues, brokenly. “It turned out to be an infant. A newborn so small, I almost thought it to be an Asir offspring were it not for the blue of it’s skin and the red of its eyes. Two of the men began to surround it, ready to snatch the babe from it’s helpless perch upon that wretched alter. I yelled for them to cease, to spare the child, but they wouldn’t _listen_ …”

The words trail off as the prince’s blue eyes glaze over in haunted recollection.

“The next thing I knew was darkness. It was a darkness I wasn’t accustomed to, devoid of thought or reason. Often when I fought on Midgard and later Jotunheim, I succumbed to such a similar sensation. Father would call it, the Berserker State, and encouraged me to delve into it often during the war. It made striking down enemies… simpler. Took off the edge of guilt or sympathy. But I always retained my mind, able to stay present even as parts of my emotions were disconnected from the acts of violence I partook in. This time… that was not the case.”

Thor trails off staring down at his hands.

“When I came to, I knew not what became of that baby I wanted to save. But all of the men who were part of the mission lay dead at my feet. All 847 soldiers of Asgard, hardened by war and conquest, maimed and burned. It was as though I was staring at a vision of what Ragnarok would look like. And then I saw my hands soaked in blood. I knew then what I had done… I started to slip once more.”

“That’s when Odin discovered me,” Thor finishes, face in hands. “Furious and frightened, He bound me in those shackles before I could fall into the Berserker State again. The next thing I knew, I was in here. My war room. Only the All-Father has taken the liberty of refurbishing it so that I could remain banished for all eternity. Before he bid me farewell, my benevolent father disowned me and left me with that mural as a parting gift, swearing that for my treason, none would never know I came home from Jotunheim alive. That I would never see my mother again-”

Suddenly Thor chokes out what sounds almost like a sob, causing Loki to hurry forward and pull him into a tight embrace. He feels the older man shake within the circle his arms, doubtlessly attempting to hold back any more tears before he speaks again.

“That curse… it was meant to transform me into a monster. But in the end, I never needed to reach my own demise. It only served so that I would find myself falling into that darkness sooner rather than later,” Thor shudders. “Hela… whoever she was, she must have known that about me already.”

“Ridiculous…” Loki hisses under his breath, stepping back and glaring up at Thor. “She was a vengeful hag who projected her own imperfections onto you.”

“You do not know that…”

“Thor, look at me.”

Thor stops speaking as Loki steps into his space once more, hands cupping either side of his face to keep him focused. 

“You were just a child. What that witch did to you was no different than what your men did to those civilians in the temple.”

“I’m a monster, Loki,” Thor says emphatically. “I slaughtered thousands of frost giants eagerly and without remorse.”

“But you aren’t,” Loki says. “You fought off enemies of Asgard with bravery and _diligence _. Still, you never once sought to kill the bystanders of that war. Even when you lost yourself to the Berserker State, you did so to try to save that child’s life.”__

____

____

Loki smiles, voice firm but warm. “You fell into that state again not minutes ago, and you did not kill me.”

“I could have…”

“But you _didn’t_.”

Thor stops shaking, at last, eyes fixed upon Loki’s, a hand coming up to cover one of those still cupping his cheek, his beard nuzzling in the palm of the slighter god. 

They remain like that for longer than necessary, just needing to be close, Thor for reassurance and Loki for support. The current king of Asgard looks up at the man who he knows to be his brother. He feels something click into place in his mind as he struggles to understand the emotions swirling with himself. One look at Thor’s parted mouth and darkened eyes says the older god is probably drawing similar conclusions. It makes him realize that he must end this now. Before he does something he’ll deeply regret.

Reluctantly, Loki pulls away, making a show of straightening his attire and clearing his throat. 

“Are you alright now, brother?” He asks. When Thor nods, he nods quickly back. “Good… very well then.”

There’s another long pause where neither of them dares to say anything. Then Loki is making for the edge of the cell and feeling for any resistance for him attempting to leave it. Thor watches him without a word as he mutters a few spells and passes through unhindered, feeling like all the air has come flowing back into his lungs now that he stands under the mural in it’s unobstructed state.

“Loki,” Thor says suddenly, drawing the other man’s attention back to him. “Your fighting style earlier…”

“What of it?” Loki bristles, waiting for Thor to reprimand him again for being so reckless.

“You fight almost like a _Valkyrie_.” 

There’s a sudden familiar reverence in Thor’s tone that makes Loki blink in surprise. He recognizes the admiration there and it reminds him very much of himself when hearing about Thor as a child. 

“It sounds as though you were a fan of them.”

Thor’s cheeks turn an interesting red as he flusters and looks away, “You had your heros growing up. The Valkyrie were mine.”

The sight of the god of thunder acting so childlike and earnest makes Loki feel strange again. He stifles that creeping sensation down, shaking his head.

“I must go,” he says quickly heading to the entry. “It’s nearly dawn.”

“Until tomorrow then,” Thor calls from across the room, uncertainty in his tone.

Loki pauses at the foot of the stairwell, offering a smile over his shoulder. “Of course.”

The smile Thor favors him with stays with him even as he sneaks away under the cover of night back to his chambers. Not caring that he was expected to be up in the morning for another meeting, Loki flings himself face first into his bed. As he drifts, he finds himself whispering another promise to Thor from afar.

“I promise you brother… the sun will shine on us again.”


	9. The Casket

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The closer Loki gets to uncovering the secrets of his family's past, the more he discovers about his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for your patience as we near the end of this story. I know I originally promised daily updates, but life seems to have other plans. My goal is to have this all uploaded by next week.
> 
> Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy the next chapter.

_It’s not the first time Loki has visited this painting and it won't be the last. There are many tributes to his older brother scattered throughout Asgard, but none so captivating as this particular piece. It was made just before Thor went to Midgard to liberate the mortals from the frost giants. He looks nothing short of regal in armor fashioned by the finest smiths in the nine realms, Mjolnir raised high in the air as he poses proudly. The boyish smile of young man beams brighter than the lightning cascading in the background of a temperate storm. With a gentle slide of his fingers, Loki traces the stray hairs falling over his brother’s face, almost as if he were really there and not just a beautiful mural painted on the walls of the palace._

_“So here’s where you’ve been hiding, your highness.”_

_Green eyes shift from the painting down the hallway to his left. Fandral and Sif approach, both covered in dirt and looking flushed from exertion. He smirks noting the lump above Fandral’s eye. “Sif beat you again, I see. And here I thought you were supposed to be the apprentice of the greatest two warriors Asgard has ever known.”_

_“Be kind to him, Loki,” Sif says cheerfully patting the disgruntled blonde man on the shoulder as she walks past him. “He’s had a rough morning.”_

_“Were you two not my students, and members of the court of Asgard, I would teach you to mind how you speak to your elders,” Fandral scolds, albeit half heartedly._

_Loki cocks his hip and blinks. “You’re only 250 years our senior. That’s hardly what I consider ancient.”_

_“Then the next time I engage in a bit of innocent flirtations, neither of you will call me a desperate old man?”_

_“_ No _,” Sif and Loki reply in unison._

_Fandral very nearly pouts before he tactfully switches the topic from mocking him to Loki’s whereabouts. “In any event, why did you decide to skip practice today, My Prince? You didn’t enchant the axes to sing again did you?”_

_“That prank stopped being funny ages ago,” Loki waves distractedly, focus retiring to the picture. “I simply wanted to look upon the face of Asgard’s greatest hero. I haven’t done so for some time.”_

_“You really admire him, don’t you?” Sif notes, folding her arms and gazing up at the painted features of Loki’s older brother with an almost dreamy expression._

_“Of course, but so do you,” Loki responds with teasing smirk at the woman’s flushed face._

_Sif retaliates with a small swat at his arm. “Stop it, Loki. He was a great warrior.”_

_“And handsome,” Loki adds, dodging another swat and laughing. His eyes trail back to the image with a soft exhale. “He was everything the future king of Asgard should have been. Courageous, strong… Exactly the sort of monarch the people would love.”_

_Loki finds himself imagining, not for the first time, what it could have been like with Thor as the heir of Asgard instead of him. How much lighter he would feel without having to carry the burden on his own. Thor would be the king, but Loki… He could still have ruled by his side. Be his adviser, his closest confidant. The one whose opinions Thor trusted most of all._

_“You know,” Fandral sighs, pulling Loki back to reality, staring at the picture with a defeated shrug. “I sometimes wish you would swoon over me the way you do for him. I’m almost jealous.”_

_Loki bristles, cheeks heating at the implication. “I-”_

_“That’s his brother, Fandral,” Sif says flatly, though there is a strange look on her face as she glances over at Loki._

_Fandral offers a similar look as he turns away from the mural. Then he grins and nods. “Yes. Yes he is. Which is why I was referring to you, my dear Sif.”_

_There is boisterous laughter followed by sputtered objections as Fandral the Dashing lives up to his name sake and dashes down the hall, Sif hot on his heels. Loki hears himself chuckle at their antics, but something about the words his senior spoke just moments before nags at him._

_Loki goes to follow after the ruckus his two friends are making, pausing to glance at Thor’s portrait one last time. It’s very true that Thor was an attractive man. But the pull the prince feels every time he listens to stories of his elder brother’s life or the fluttering in his chest whenever he sees sculptures or tapestries in his honor are simply that of a doting younger sibling. It was only natural he would miss his family even though they never met. That’s what he is feeling…_

_“… He’s my brother,” Loki whispers decisively before turning away and furiously filing his feelings away to examine another time._

 

***

Something dangerous lurks in the West Wing of the dungeons. It isn’t a monster like the one Fandral teased him about as a child, but it’s no less frightening. Until very recently, Loki could only speculate what horrors his father had hidden away in the dark depths of the prison. But now the young sorcerer has seen it for himself, freed it from it’s restraints without hesitation or regret, felt the raw power and energy of the storm in all it’s godlike glory… None of those things are the part of Thor that scares him the most.

A small gale is brewing outside of Loki’s bedroom window, winds whistling outside the glass as he stands before it and ponders what it is about going to visit the dungeons now that worries him so. This change in weather isn’t Thor’s doing this time. The fact that Loki can know with such certainty, can sense without doubt when the weather is natural or if it’s being affected by his brother, that’s only a fraction of his fears.

He’s been true to his word, still searching for the solution to breaking the curse placed upon the older god. A curse placed by a being who seemed to share a connection with Thor… and their father. Even after Thor told him everything that happened on Jotunheim, Loki still goes to him, the knowledge that the blood on Thor’s hands was not merely that of his enemies, but of his own people does not change Loki’s heart. If anything, it only made him that much more determined to free the man who he revered almost since infancy. 

Those feelings that for years went without a name are what Loki can now recognize as the most dangerous part about Thor.

Loki’s arms wrap around himself tightly as he recalls those emotions of admiration and longing he felt in his youth. Looking at them through the eyes of an adult now revealed more than he was comfortable confronting. And the revelation that he perhaps looked upon Thor not just as a brother should, but how an admirer would makes him shiver in mild revulsion.

He cannot pinpoint the exact moment his feelings for Thor became something so corrupted, so twisted between affection and attraction, but he knows they’ve been for so much longer than he’s comfortable admitting to himself. The allure was there even in their first meeting. Looking back on it now, it’s almost painfully obvious to Loki that Thor felt something too. The flirting, the not so subtle gazes, the need to be near one another almost compulsively.

And now they have added touch into this. Ever since Loki entered Thor’s cell to break the chains that were hurting more than helping him, he’s only wanted to go back for more. Its through sheer force of will and Thor’s demands that he not enter again lest he put himself in harm's way, that Loki has resisted that temptation. But it’s an ever present desire that burrows itself in Loki’s heart like a parasite, eating away at his resolve enough that Loki no longer visits Thor every night. 

Thor seems aware of this unease in Loki. Though he doesn’t remark on it, he too can sense a shift in their interactions with one another, and respects Loki’s silent boundaries without question. He doesn’t comment on the brevity of their meetings, doesn’t protest when Loki opts to leave the cell early instead of lingering long into the night. He cannot, however, hide the disappointment in his deep blue eyes when Loki departs, cannot quite keep his voice from wavering when he bids him good night. 

Rain begins to gently tap against the clear plains of glass as Loki watches the progression of this quiet storm outside. He thinks of Thor, alone and miserable in his cell. Thinks of his brother and wishes that circumstances were not so messy between them. He still wishes that they grew up together as boys, were bonded together as brothers should be. Yet he also wishes they were not bound by blood… fancies a life where neither of them were family, but that they could still meet. That they could perhaps allow themselves to nurture these strange feelings without guilt or shame.

‘ _He is my brother_ ,’ Loki thinks as he glares at his reflection in the window one last time before huffing and making his way over to his bed, a hand summoning a gust of wind to snuff the candles out as he pulls the blankets tight around himself and closes his eye, the rain slowing it’s rhythmic tapping as the storm finally passes.

‘He’s the family I longed to have growing up… It will pass,’ he tells himself.

He only hopes it will pass sooner rather than later.

***

_There is a hush over the land as Thor’s anguish quells. The tempest passes almost as swiftly as it came, leaving behind a broken shape of a man huddled on the ground. Thor’s body trembles as he uncurls from his feeble crouch and looks skyward with tears streaming down his eyes._

_Then suddenly he hunches forward once more as a chain appears from nowhere and snaps over his wrists forming shackles. Thor instinctively tries to resist before a swell of power shakes around him, forcing him back to his knees._

_“Stand down,” a voice calls out, but Thor only fights harder. It’s like watching a feral beast trying to escape a deadly trap. The voice calls out again. Louder. “I said STAND DOWN.”_

_More chains circle around Thor’s body, trapping him in place as the last of his energy finally gives and the God of Thunder’s eyes roll back. He falls to the ground unconscious, but alive. Subdued by the might of the magic woven into his bindings._

_And then, the landscape shifts and blurs, the snowflakes falling around Thor’s body disappearing as awareness creeps up again._

_Loki knows he is dreaming. His vision of Thor’s memory is rearranged until he is laying with his back against a hard stone surface. He realizes that he is staring up at the ceiling of the inside of the temple, sick and hungry and scared. His body feels weak as though it’s barely hanging on to life. He stares at the dark, blue overhead until he hears the sound of footsteps echo closer and closer to the altar upon which he lays, crying and alone._

_Odin’s face suddenly appears above him, his face still carrying the scars of battle.There is an angry deep red hole in the space where his right eye once was while the remaining eye gazes down at Loki with pity and wonder. Relieved and desperate for comfort, from starvation and lack of affection, Loki reaches for him with his tiny blue hands-_

***

Loki’s eyes fly open to see his outstretched hands, gasping as he jumps from sleep to waking quicker than he’s ever felt in his life. Green eyes stare at the appendages over his head, hard. They are white, almost translucent in the moonlight that creeps across his bed, with long fingers that shake under his scrutiny. They are the same hands he’s always had.

But now the god of mischief has the sickening feeling something just isn’t _right_.

He stands and dresses immediately, bursting out of the room with narrow minded focus as he hurried towards the vaults beneath the throne room. This dream was different from the others. This one wasn’t Thor’s. He was fairly certain the vision he had at the tail end of this particular night had been his alone. There was but one way to be certain. One way to tell if what his gut is telling him is true. 

He navigates the labyrinth of steps easily, remembering the times he came down here as a child, the times his father would show him the evidence of Asgard’s great legacy. Loki snarls as he picks up his pace, making his way at last to the vault itself. His eyes immediately fall upon the soft glowing form of the Casket of Ancient Winters. Slowly, hesitantly, he then approaches.

Many years ago, Odin had told Loki that no Asir could physically touch the casket. Not even the All-Father himself. Doing so would freeze their limbs right down to the bone and kill them. An almost certain death awaiting the fool that dares to lay a hand upon the deep blue surface, what he’s doing now is absolutely foolish.

Unless…

Loki steals himself as he stands before the ancient weapon, hands hovering near the handles on either side of the casket. The dread pooling inside of him isn’t the fear of death. Rather the apprehension of a fate far worse than dying. Then with a lurch forward, Loki grasps the handles of the casket, waiting for the searing pain of cold to send him into a coma for being so vacuous.

Only he doesn’t feel pain. Nothing even close the word. Instead, Loki feels the cold, but not in a way that’s expected. The icy sensation creeps through him, enveloping his body in something that feels familiar and safe.

And then-

“No… ,” whispers Loki, examining his skin in equal parts abject horror and fascination as the paleness of his Asir form begins to bleed away into icy blue. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t real!

Then suddenly a voice cries out behind him, “STOP!”


	10. The Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The origins of Loki, Prince of Asgard are finally revealed, and the tension between the two brothers comes to a head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alas, it seems my master plan of uploading the rest of the fic this week was thwarted again. But we are very near the end, my dear readers, so I hope you'll stick with me a little longer. My apologies for making you all wait so long.
> 
> This chapter contains some sexual content, the quality of which I'm hoping isn't too terrible. Enjoy!

Frigga’s shout reverberates off the walls of the vault before fading. Silence hangs over the room like a cloud of storms, heavy and ominous as both the prince of Asgard and the Queen remain unmoving, Frigga standing at one end of the chamber with Loki at the other. The god of mischief with his back to the All-Mother, eyes still glued to the transformation happening before him. To him.

“Am I cursed?” Loki asks quietly, still holding the casket, staring down at the foreign skin that’s now fully taken over.

“No,” whispers Frigga.

Loki breaths, face twisted in grief. “What am I?”

“You are my son,” Frigga answers, gentle and soothing, calmly speaking to him in a tone that would work to console him as a child. It doesn’t work now.

Slowly, Loki turns around, the skin of his true body taking a hold him, erasing every inch of Asir in him. “What more than that?”

“Loki… please.” Frigga pleads softly, but offers no further explanation. Loki doesn’t expect her to. So he glares and steps towards the Queen with deliberate and forceful strides, tears shimmering behind his eyes.

“The casket wasn’t the only thing Father took from Jotunheim that day, was it?”

Frigga says nothing even as Loki comes to a stop at the foot of the stairs. He stares up at his mother as she begins to tremble, wanting to tell all yet fearing the outcome. Loki’s own voice shakes as he firmly repeats.

“What am I? No more secrets, mother.”

Frigga shuts her eyes and begins to speak, “In the aftermath of the battle, your father went into the temple and he found a baby.”

She pauses, then looks down to her still shaking hands. “He was so small for a giant’s offspring. Odin said he found the babe abandoned. Suffering. Left to die…” 

Loki’s breathing begins to pick up, a million thoughts overwhelming him at once, but one question overrides them all.

“ _Why_?” He asks, accusingly, unable to hold back the contempt in his tone. “He was knee-deep in Jotun blood. Why would he take me?”

“You were just an innocent child-,” Frigga starts, voice sounding so convincingly sympathetic that it only makes the anger simmering in Loki come to a full boil.

“No,” Loki cuts her off, then lowers his voice. “Odin never lets his heart dictate his judgment. You’ve always told me yourself that there is a _purpose_ to everything the All-Father does. He took me for a purpose. What was it?”

Frigga shakes her head. “Loki, dearest-“

“TELL ME!!!” Loki yells pleadingly, aching and heartbroken.

Flinching, squeezing her eyes shut, Frigga answers wetly, “Your father… he thought that we could bring about a permanent peace between Asgard and Jotunheim… through you.”

“Wha…” Loki can’t even finish the single word. It sounds so pathetically broken and shattered. Much like his own heart. He swallows, sensing there was a finale twist to this tale that would stune him.

“The baby,” Frigga continues, looking back up to Loki with tears in her eyes, “was Laufey’s son.”

There was.

“ _Laufey’s_ son?” Loki repeats numbly, not realizing he had looked away from Frigga until his mind comes back from the fog the revelation threw him into. His eyes fly back to his mothers, searching for the truth in her gaze.

But there is no lie to be found there, even as the All-Mother affirms grimly, “Yes.” 

There are no words to describe the depths of Loki’s despair in the wake of these truths. Once more, there is only silence, until the Queen can no longer seem to bear it.

“Loki. My darling child, _please_ ,” Frigga beseeches walking over to him,reaching for his shoulders only for Loki to flinch away. Her hand pause just short of touching him. “I know this is hard for you… I begged your father to be honest with you from the beginning. There should be no secrets within a family.”

“So why did you _lie_?” Loki asks bitterly, the tracks of tears never fully drying on his cheeks. 

“We kept the truth from you so that you would never feel different,” Frigga explains, reaching out again, tracing his cheeks with her hands. Loki shivers under the contact, conflicted between shoving her away and leaning further into the touch. “You are our son Loki. And we your family. You must know that.”

“And…” Frigga goes on, pausing again a moment before she adds, fresh tears spilling over. “He also did it for me.”

He can hardly make sense of anything being said to him now, his own eyes overflowing in tears of volume. It’s a struggle for him to even force the question out, “What- What are you talking about?”

“When Odin brought you home, I had lost one son that day,” Frigga says, the pain in her tone so strong that it hurts Loki even more to hear it, yet all at once he cannot stand to listen any longer. “And so your father… he gave me another.”

“You never lost him,” whispers Loki, hoarsely.

Frigga’s eyes widen immediately, her breath catching in her throat, “… What?”

Loki doesn’t speak for a while, still panting as a fresh new wave of guilt and disgust rises within him. He can still hear Heimdall’s warning in the back of his mind, recalled the condition he had laid out before Loki that until now he was able to keep. He swallows and decides he no longer cares about waiting for the ‘right time.’

“Your son,” Loki clarifies. “Your _true_ son… Thor. He never fell that day in Jotunheim. Not to his death, at least.”

Frigga’s shock melts into denial, a soft laugh caught in her throat as she struggles to grasp what has been laid bare before her. “Loki, I don’t unders–”

“ _He lied to you, too, Mother_ ,” says Loki emphatically, biting his lip as he carries on, the words spilling out. It’s not unlike extracting poison from a wound, what he’s doing now. It’s bringing a sense of relief even as it kills him to do this. To tell his mother that the husband she trusted in so implicitly had deceived them both. “Odin… He lied to us both. He told you Thor was dead, and yet he lives!”

Frigga steps back from him, voice fighting to remain calm, frowning as denial gives way to anger, “Loki, stop this! I know you’re confused, but to lash out like this? To say such things-! Your father would _never_ –”

“What?” Loki challenges, tone changing from desperate and hurt to sharp and barbed, stepping closer even as Frigga draws back. “Never lie? _Please_ don’t tell me you forgot what we just discussed not minutes ago.”

Her mouth moves without forming words, and still Loki pushes.

“He told me I was the Prince of Asgard. Born to be it’s rightful ruler. Born to be its King. All the while knowing exactly who I was… _what_ I was. And _you_ went along with it.”

Loki’s voice breaks at last, anguish and rage that he never knew he could feel bubbling up from within. It hurts so much, too much, to hold it all back any longer. He feels his mother move to embrace him again, feels her hands seeking to caress his hair and face. It was something he would welcome once, but now he wants none of it. He just wants her to _wake up_ and see.

“ _Thor is alive, Mother!!!_ ” Loki snaps, panting and stepping away from her to point downwards. “I have seen it with my own eyes! I saw how he was hidden in the depths of the dungeons. Locked away like an animal! All because of a curse that was placed on him decades ago!”

“Loki please see reason!” Frigga pleads sternly. “Your Father-!”

“ _HE IS NOT MY FATHER!_!” Loki screams, the rawness of his turmoil echoing in the vault around them.

“… Then am I not your mother?”

The question hangs there between them longer than is comfortable. Inside Loki wants nothing more than to say ‘yes, of course you are.’ But her blind loyalty to a man who has done nothing but conceal from him, groom and belittle him into becoming something that was never meant to be his wins out. If she refuses to see reason, then…

He straightens his back, hardening his face as he lets his voice turn to ice. “… You’re not.”

Without another word, Loki storms past the All-Mother, forcing himself not to look back and glance at her expression. His walk turns into a brisk pace, and then before he knows it, he’s running. Sprinting away from the palace, from the fanciful lies that have been spoon fed to him all his life. He doesn't look back as his feet carry him to the one place in Asgard left for him. The only place where he knows nothing but truth.

 

*** 

 

Thor is already waiting in his cell when Loki steps into the prison chamber, face pinched in alarm at the site of the younger god who walks in deliberate steps towards his cell.

“Loki,” Thor whispers, taking in the disheveled state of the smaller man’s hair, the red in his eyes giving away that he has been crying. “What happened?”

“That baby you found…” Loki says so quietly Thor strains to catch his every word. “The Jotun child you tried to save the day your curse took hold. It was _me_.”

The silence was deafening by the time Thor’s ability to speak returns to him, face white as a sheet of parchment paper, and just as frail. “… How is that possible?”

Loki swallows before forcing himself to recount his discovery in the vault back to Thor. It spills out of him more easily than he thought it would, every detail mulled over from the vivid dreams to his confrontation with the All-Mother. On and on the story plays out, with angry hand movements and vigorous pacing, until finally Loki finishes. His shoulders slump, shaking with fresh falling tears. Thor, who had not uttered a single syllable throughout Loki's tirade, reaches his hand out to lay flat against the barrier.

“Loki…” Thor trails off, finding no words sufficient enough to try and consol the other man as Loki finds his voice again.

“It was all a lie,” he murmurs, eyes trailing up to the the mural on the ceiling dully. “Your death. My heritage. _Everything_.” 

“Brother-”

Suddenly Loki hunches forward and laughs, hard and long and starling Thor from completing his thought. He watches warily as the younger god collects himself with a final little chuckle. “Oh how _deeply_ ironic. You referring to me as your ‘brother,’ now. After learning what I actually am.”

“You are my brother, though,” says Thor earnestly, firmly. “Blood related or otherwise, we are still family.”

“It’s rather pathetic, you know… But I always dreamed of us growing up together. Playing together. Fighting together,” Loki sniffs and brings a hand up to furiously rub his eyes. “But none of that matters anymore, I suppose. Nothing truly matters any longer.”

A pause. Then something decisive appears in Loki’s eyes, feet stepping closer towards Thor, lips thinned in resolve. Thor’s own eyes enlarge as he realizes what Loki means to do. Both hands now press hard against the barrier as he shouts, “Loki, don’t-!”

Loki does. He steps past the barrier as Thor moves back, standing before his brother panting, eyes still sore from crying.

“I am done being his puppet,” Loki says firmly, blinking away the tears still caught his lashes like morning dew. “If being a son of Odin means living a life of lies, then I want no part of it. I no longer care for anything beyond this wretched barrier… Everything I care about is right here.”

“Loki,” Thor sighs heavily, moving to embrace him, surprisingly gentle despite how much he’s squeezing. Loki returns it, burying his face into the thickness of his neck, breathing him in as if his very life depends upon it. A moment later Thor pulls away, hands coming up to shake Loki’s shoulders. “Do you not realize how foolish that was? It’s not safe to be so near to me. Remember what happened the last time-”

“I don’t care,” Loki shakes his head vehemently, wanting nothing more than to be so close to Thor that he’s aware of little else. “I wouldn’t care even if you were truly dangerous. But you’re not. You would never hurt me… You’re the only one who hasn’t hurt me.”

“That’s not true,” Thor chides quietly. “What of your friends, Loki? What of Hogun and Volstagg and their companions?”

“I’m Asgard’s crown prince and temporary king,” says Loki with no small trace of melancholy in his tone, reciting the praises like one reads a script. “Beloved by all. The realm’s pride and joy… That’s the only reason your friends ever decided to try being mine, too. It’s the reason I have any friends to begin with. But when they learn the truth…”

Loki falls quiet again, the possibilities of that revelation too much for him to contemplate. He suppresses the shudder of dread creeping through him and looks to the floor.

“In any event, what’s done is done. I have nothing left to go back to.”

“And what of our mother?” Thor reasons, not relenting even as Loki shakes his head again. “Surely she never intended to do you harm. I know she did not.”

“And yet, she _did_ ,” Loki bites back. “It doesn’t matter what the intent was, it hurts just the same.”

“Loki be _sensible_ , now. You cannot possibly wish to stay here.”

“You clearly didn’t hear me the first time so let me repeat myself,” Loki says sternly, moving back slightly. “There is nothing left for me up there. All I am to expect are lies and deceit. I can’t go back to the way things were. Not even for Mother-”

He chokes on the last word as Thor’s hand reaches up to cradle his neck. It’s so large and calloused, but yet so gentle, his fingers weaving into the fine strands of hair at Loki nape. It’s such a small gesture, but Loki feels so warm from it. He leans back into it and sighs.

“I cannot be a part of that sham any longer.”

“You’re going to regret even thinking that,” Thor chastises softly. “You are angry, Loki, but you don’t mean everything that you say-“

“Yes I do,” Loki says, eyes falling half shut as he whispers. “I care about _you_ , Thor.”

There’s that familiar emotion that Loki cannot decipher behind Thor’s eyes as they dart down to stare at Loki’s mouth. He’s seen it so many times before but this time, it’s different… It’s almost akin to a hunger.

All further examination comes to a screeching halt, however, because Thor’s kissing him.

The action shocks Loki into stillness, unable to process how and why this is all happening. But then instinct wins over, and he finds himself kissing back, clumsy with inexperience and nerves. Thor hardly seems to mind, if he notices at all.

It’s not his first kiss, per say. Loki is by no means an expert on the subject and never went beyond this point, but every kiss he’s ever experienced always left him wondering what the fuss was about. It was disappointing, pointless, and even mildly disgusting. But this… This is his first real kiss. A kiss that even registers as pleasing, as good. As _right_. 

The growl that rolls off Thor’s lips is like thunder, rumbling through Loki so violently it makes him tremble. He wants to do more than kiss the man before him. He wants so much more, that the thought of what comes next makes his knees give- 

Strong, powerful arms are lifting him under his thighs and hoisting him up against the stones of the cell’s freezing walls. The cold normally had little effect on Loki (a bitter part of his mind laughs to himself knowing now why), but right now Loki feels it acutely and shivers. He feels it in sharp contrast to the heat from Thor’s body, which is pressed firmly against Loki’s own. 

He just feels Thor everywhere. The thunderer’s lips upon his neck and his face, teeth leaving marks across the skin he encounters there. His beard scraping his cheeks and throat and collar and chest as Thor maps the expanse of the trickster’s body with his tongue. His hands cover the plains of his little brother’s figure that his mouth cannot reach, rough fingers tracing his legs, his thighs, his abdomen, his ass. And Thor’s hips are rocking maddeningly into Loki’s creating a friction that’s both increasingly pleasurable and infuriatingly unsatisfying.

“Tell me to stop,” Thor panics, pulling back but a breath away from Loki to peer down at his face. His entire body trembles from suppressed emotion that Loki feels it may be Thor who breaks before he does. “Please… Tell me to cease this madness before I descend into it further.”

“Thor…” Loki swallows, eyes fluttering as he stares blearily back at the other man’s not quite guilty expression.

“Brother, _please_.”

At that Loki moans, hands gripping tighter to Thor as he peers up as though in a haze. Then the god of mischief slowly smiles, legs tightening and causing Thor to gasp in shock.

“Call me that again,” Loki whispers, eyes sliding down to stare at Thor’s heaving chest, resting a hand over where his heart hammers unrelentingly behind the cage of his ribs. “Call me ‘brother’ as you fuck me against this dank, forsaken cell. Call me ‘brother’ so that Odin can hear it even in his thrice damned sleep. Let him hear what he has done to you… to us.”

“Loki-“

Thor’s hands are grasping and releasing against him, the blue of his eyes nearly eclipsed in black as Loki leans up and whispers, “I don’t want you to hold back anymore, _Brother_. I want you to take me. _Ruin_ me for anyone else.”

He can feel Thor’s resolve crumbling, feel the danger of the taller man’s tensed body as he sucks in a breath. Loki’s silver tongue strikes gold as he utters the final, crushing blow.

“Don’t. _Stop_.”

There is a ragged snarl tearing itself from Thor’s mouth as he forces Loki’s into silence. This kiss isn’t at all like the first. There’s no hesitation, and the desperation is tempered with a vicious sort of purpose. Thor takes him apart without restraint, and all Loki can do is accept everything that is given to him. He feels the tremble in Thor’s fingers as they pull and press into his leathers, fumbling for his belts.

“You wear far too much,” Thor suddenly hisses against Loki’s ear, reluctantly breaking the kiss.

Loki laughs, breathlessly. “I thought you liked a challenge. Is the God of Thunder to be defeated by a few layers of clothing?”

There’s a loud rip, followed by a shock of coolness. Loki’s breath catches from the shock, not quite believing what has just occurred.

“There. Much better,” says Thor smugly, rolling what’s left of the ruined leather breeches down Loki’s legs, his boots the only part of him below the waist kept in tack.

“Y-you…brute,” Loki tries to scold but finds himself fighting off a gasp as Thor’s hands caress the newly exposed skin of his thighs. “Those… were- _ahhh_.”

Rarely is the trickster at a loss for words, but Thor is making it damn near impossible to find them. Loki does remember to mutter an enchantment, the spell coating Thor’s probing fingers as they reach behind him. The taller god pauses from the coolness and stares at Loki in astonished realization.

“That…” says Thor, “is a very useful trick.”

“Spell,” Loki corrects with another pointed roll of his hips. “Now make _use_ of it.”

Luckily his brother needs no further provocation. It’s never not strange to have something inside him so intimately, but Thor goes slowly, allowing Loki to adjust as he starts with a single finger before adding in another. All the while, Loki palms himself, trying to both distract from the discomfort and intensify the arousal. It becoming easier the more time passes and then-

“ _Oh_!” 

Loki bucks, overcome by the sudden graze of Thor’s third finger joining in and brushing against a spot that makes him see stars. He can hardly get out the words ‘again’ before Thor starts deliberately aiming to please him. Loki’s pants and whimpers grow in frequency, his hand stroking over himself faster.

“I-It’s fine,” Loki implores, moaning. “Ah, _Norns_ … It’s fine. I’m ready- please!”

Then Thor’s fingers pull out of him, his hand moving to work open his fly. Understanding what is about to happen, nearly passing out of the sheer momentum of what they’re about to do, Loki murmurs another spell quickly under his breath as Thor’s cock is freed at last. The girth of its head rubs tantalizing slow over the younger man’s newly slicked hole. It’s torment of the worst kind and Loki can bare it no longer.

“Do it,” Loki sighs, groaning against Thor’s beard as it rubs raw over his lips. “Please, Brother-!”

Loki’s mouth falls into a silent scream as Thor, at last, presses into him. Slow, devastatingly slow, teeth grinding together as though it’s the only thing holding the taller god back from the brink. Loki's eyes prickle and sting as he concentrates on breathing. It’s so much different that when it had simply been Thor’s fingers. Certainly different from he had pleasured himself alone in his bed, the rare times he used those strange toys he had found on a trip to Alfheim in his younger years. Thor’s whispering soothing nonsense into his ears. There are praises occasionally cut off by a curse or two from them both as Thor bottoms out.

“Ah!” Loki’s voice is pulled from him once again, his head tossing before it rolls back down so that his eyes meet with Thor’s.

Neither of them move for the longest of moments, locked in a single second of absolute, excruciating bliss. Their lives are forever altered. Loki knows that much. But it started long before this. It could be traced to that precise point in the young prince's life where he decided to venture into Thor’s secluded cell, but even that was never truly the beginning for them.

Truly, their lives were entangled the day Thor found him in Jotunheim, the day that twisted curse took hold of the golden prince of Asgard and nearly destroyed him. And now they are one at last. It feels to Loki like it was always meant to be such… That his entire life was incomplete, empty of true meaning until this singular moment. It’s so terribly cliche that Loki would laugh at the sentiment were his mind not so far gone.

A sudden bashfulness overwhelms Loki, pulling his gaze from Thor’s and twisting his head to hide in his shoulder-

Thor’s hand, the same hand he had witnessed in dreams crushing the skulls of innocent men like they were mere eggshells, catches his chin, surprisingly gentle but firm. Slowly, he turns Loki’s face back to his, eyes burning imploringly into the younger prince’s. He looks as though he’s drinking in every detail he see before him. And what a picture he must make, to cause his brother to stare at him so… it’s a look no one has ever given him and Loki’s eyes burn with tears. 

Neither of them realize they aren’t breathing until Thor lets out a soft, shuddering sigh, thumb stroking the sharp outline of Loki’s cheek. Loki answers with a breathy, exhaled moan.

And then finally… Thor moves.

One thrust.

Loki gasps, fingers clutching into the meat of his brother’s biceps.

Another.

Loki’s eyes fall shut, and a choked groan escapes him without shame.

Another. And another.

Somewhere soon after, the younger god loses count. Loses all care of counting. He simply gives himself into the feeling, every single sense alive in ways they never were before. The surreality of the moment melts into him as deeply as his brother’s thrusts, while simultaneously clashing with the disbelief that lingers in a distant, fleeting corner of his mind.

“So good… So perfect… Loki- _shit_ ,” Thor gasps making Loki delirious with the knowledge that Thor’s as far gone as he feels.

There’s a name for this, though he cannot for the life of him pinpoint it amid his euphoria, but it’s there on the tip of his tongue. It isn’t fucking, Loki thinks dimly. Not entirely. It’s rough, though there is also a certain gentleness in what Thor does to him. It is passionate, to be sure, a slow burning ember that finally catches fire. But there’s also emotion and meaning and purpose behind everything they are doing right now. It’s not just sex… They’re making love.

The very realization drives him over the edge, his free hand sliding down to rub himself in tandem with Thor’s motions and oh… _OH_!

“Oh, _brother_ … _Brother_! I’m so close! Ah, Thor… _Thor_!!!”

Loki comes, voice higher than he’s ever heard himself sound, shuddering and sobbing from the intensity of it all, cock twitching and spurting hard between his and Thor’s bodies.

He registers vaguely that Thor’s thrusting harder into him now, animalistic grunts and groans escaping him as his hurries to join Loki in his climax. It’s all Loki can do but to hold on tight as Thor’s body presses fervently against him, softly whimpering from overstimulation and exhaustion. Then the God of Thunder is grabbing a hold of Loki’s hips and moving them to meet his own. 

“ _Sh-shit_!! Loki… _Brother_!”

Once. Twice. Three times.

Thor crushes them both into the wall in a grip that will most definitely bruise later, marks that will no doubt take weeks before they fully heal. Loki moans when Thor’s hips still against him, frantically pumping his seed into his body. It feels strange, so full. 

God of Fertility indeed, Loki thinks, his moans turning into little sighs that answer Thor’s gasps. And then at last, everything settles. It’s over.

There’s a sense of pleasant nothingness in this aftermath. Just the dim feeling of sweat and come still cooling on their bodies, and the sound of their breaths still penetrating harshly into the air between them. Loki’s legs slide down from around Thor’s, his arms loosen without quiet letting go. His back feels like it’s been resting upon sandpaper, no doubt red and raw from the stone scraping against the skin. He’s certain Thor’s arms and shoulders are in a similar state, only instead of a wall, it was Loki’s nails. It’s blissfully empty from reason and Loki never wants to recover from it.

“I… I do as well,” pants Thor after sense creeps back into their heads, the fog of lust slowly dissipating.

Loki blinks, the last of his tears falling away from his eyes as Thor’s words and face come back into focus. “You what?”

Thor kisses his chest, his chin, his brow. Then he rests his forehead against Loki’s and clears his throat. “I care for you.”

Loki’s breath catches again, heart fluttering tiredly. “Oh…”

Then he smiles. It’s the first time since everything came crashing down around him, since the truth beneath Odin's lies finally sprang forth to wreck his perception on everything he ever knew and adored. It feels wonderful.

***

At some point the night before, Thor had carried Loki back to his cot where they both fell into a blessedly dreamless sleep, the younger god draped over the older. When Loki awakes the next day, it’s to catch sight of Thor staring back at him with such warmth and adoration it makes the trickster flush anew. 

They exchange no words, just content to stare at one another in quiet admiration for a long as time allows them. Their hands map one another’s bodies in lazy exploration, not at all with the same haste and desperation they displayed only hours earlier. Finally, Loki stretches feeling the slightest of sensitivity in intimate places where Thor had touched him. He expected perhaps to feel some embarrassment or shyness, but instead all he feels is gratitude. He expresses that much with a soft kiss to Thor’s cheek.

“Thank you,” Loki whispers as he pulls away.

“No,” Thor shakes his head, his hand affectionately reaching up to cup Loki’s neck, fingers threading through the damp strands of his hair. “It is I who should be thanking you.”

“For what?” Loki wonders. “You’re the one who woke me from this dream I was living in. Helped me see past the All-Father’s facade.”

“But it was you who found me first,” Thor answers. “When all I had left was to despair and linger on in darkness, you came and forced me out again. You saw me as more than a failure. More than a monster.”

Loki smiles sadly. “Well, Brother mine… perhaps it simply takes one to love one.”

“You’re not a monster,” Thor says firmly.

“Then neither are you,” Loki says definitively, and then no words are spoken for a long time as he pulls the older god in for a long, tender kiss. When he moves back, it’s to reaffirm the promise he made to Thor when they first met. “Whatever it takes, I’m going to break the curse the real monster placed upon you.”

“I’m afraid, that it is impossible.”

Loki freezes eyes suddenly wide and alert, heart palpitating as dread falls like a block of ice in the pit of his gut. He feels Thor tense up as well, his large hands shaking as they grasp onto him, as if subconsciously protecting him while simultaneously seeking comfort from him. Slowly Loki turns towards the barrier to glimpse in horror at their visitor. He cannot utter a sound, but he doesn’t need to as he hears Thor’s own voice whisper in shock.

“Father.”


	11. The All-Father

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At long last, the story of what truly happened centuries ago is told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tis the season to be jolly... and extremely over-worked. Sorry for making you all wait so long. But the good news is that we only have the epilogue and then this story is complete! 
> 
> As always, I want to thank those of you who have stuck with it until the end. There were a lot of cliffhangers untill this point, but I hope the pay off for them has so far been satisfying. And while I haven't responded to comments lately, I just want to say that I do read and appreciate them, so thank you so much.
> 
> On to the story.

There was no yelling. No shouts of protest, no belittlement, or condemnation. Thor and Loki had been simply ordered to dress and stand at the edge of the cell. Odin’s voice offered not a hint as to his feelings of finding his estranged son bedding his adopted heir, but Loki can only speculate. Fury, certainly. Disappointment, specifically in Loki, almost definite. Perhaps a fair amount of shame and revolution.

The barrier has dissipated in the presence of the All-Father, and Odin stands with his eyes narrowed in quiet wrath, staring between the two men with anger and chagrin. Loki wants nothing more than to scream, to cry, to demand he stops looking upon them so disdainfully when it was he who brought so much harm to all of them. But Loki’s silver tongue fails him, still tied in terror and shock from when he first beheld the King of Asgard. Thor, standing close by his side, seems despondent.

At first the All-father says nothing, then he turns his back and commands in a steely tone. “What did I say about entering this part of the dungeons?”

The question is meant for Loki, but Thor’s mouth opens first.

“Father-“

He isn’t able to finish his thought as the All-Father snarls, louder. “ _Silence_! I believe I was speaking to your brother.”

“ _Adopted_ ,” Loki says quietly defiant, even as he shakes from the subtle ire radiating from the older god’s frame. “And yes… You told me to never enter that part of the castle, and as your subject, I obeyed. Until you fell into the Odinsleep… And I became king.”

“You ruled in my place for but eight weeks, that does _not_ make you a king.”

“I held the title-,” Loki makes to protest, only to fall silent as Odin growls.

“You _deliberately_ disobeyed me,” Odin says, turning his attention to Loki at last. “I warned you. _I forbid you_ from ever stepping foot within the West Wing, but you took it upon betray my trust in you and put the entire realm in grave danger.”

“Danger?” Loki breathes, his fear instantly manifesting into shock before melting into a low coil of anger. “You call attempting to free Asgard’s one true heir to the throne dangerous? Some might call it doing what is best not for just the kingdom but the nine realms! And as for trust?”

Loki laughs, a hysterical edge to it even as he trembles from conflicting emotions of fear and rage, “That trust was broken long ago.”

“You dare make light of the treason you’ve committed?” Odin hisses. “You dare snicker and jest after everything I’ve given to you? Everything you were taught?”

“This is no jest, _Odin king_ ,” Loki snipes back. “You see, I’ve learned a great deal with you were trapped in the Odinsleep. I learned the _real _reason what you’ve kept Thor down here, why you stole me from Jotunheim.”__

____

____

Odin shuts his eyes and sighs. “Your mother made mention of your discovery when I awoke… It was unfortunate that you found out so soon.”

“ _Soon_?” Loki breaths, mouth open in absolute shock and bafflement. “You thought I should wait a little _longer_ before I knew the truth? Was that the same infinite wisdom that drove you to lock away your real son whilst you played pretend with another king’s heir? What, you thought one bargaining chip wasn’t enough so you took me along with the casket?!”

“The words of a petulant, spoiled child,” Odin dismisses with a hard frown. “If this is what you’ve become in my slumber, then I was was a fool to think you were ready to take my place.”

The sheer condescension strikes Loki hard, his frame shrinking slightly under the words as though Odin had slapped him instead.

“Why are you here, father?” Thor speaks up at last, voice low and gravely, as though he’s forcing himself to stay perfectly still and not roar to Loki’s defense. He takes a very measured step forward, angling himself to stand beside the shorter man, in a display of reassurance for Loki and warning for Odin.

Odin’s eyes slide from Loki, his gaze ice cold and his mouth a thin irate line. “I had originally intended to see you months ago, you know… when you interrupted your brother’s coronation with your temper. In light of the circumstances, perhaps I should be thanking you.”

“And who is to blame for that?” Thor grits back, hands clenched. “You know I have little control over my powers because of what happened to me. The _curse_ you knew I was under.”

“A curse that can not be broken,” Odin bites back, scowling. “A curse that could only be contained though the very chains I presume your brother broke you free from.”

“They would have _killed him_ ,” Loki cuts in emphatically, finding his voice again. “The more he fought them, the deeper he fell into the berserker state, and it would have killed him. I had to save him-”

“At what cost?” Odin barks. “To Asgard’s detriment?”

“I already told you! Saving Thor was for the _good of_ the realm. Can you truly not see that?” 

“I am the _All-Father_. Protector of the nine realms and king of Asgard. I do NOT have to answer to you, Loki God of Mischief!” Odin shouts, stepping forward and making both gods jolt back. “Not to you or anyone else!”

“ _Thor_?”

All three men fall silent at once as another presence makes itself known. Loki peers over his father’s shoulder to see Frigga standing in the archway. Her brown eyes are wide with confusion and an emotion Loki himself cannot name, but recognizes. He too felt it on the day he first beheld his brother.

Thor, for his part, looks equally awe-struck, tears forming at the corners of his own eyes. The sight of it nearly breaks Loki’s heart. With a quivering voice so unexpected of the god of thunder, he speaks to her.

“Mother…”

Frigga says no more, rushing past the still unmoving King of Asgard to embrace her eldest son for the first time in over a thousand years. Thor holds her back just as tightly, a great wrenching sob breaking free as he angles his face into her hair. He cannot form words beyond “mother,” a mantra he repeats over and over between his unending weeping.

“Shhhh,” Frigga hushes, hands rubbing his heaving shoulders with calming circles, voice still quivering with feelings of joy and love for being reunited with her child. “Shhh. it’s alright, Thor. I am here. Oh, my boy. My sweet golden boy.”

Loki watches the display from a few feet away, feeling a bittersweet sort of elation as he takes in the scene before him. A sudden sense of isolation begins to overwhelm him though, and he thinks to perhaps pardon himself, allow them their privacy. That is until Frigga glances over to him with red rimmed, pleading eyes.

“Loki… come here.”

He hesitates, the sting of betrayal still palpable between them. Finally, he goes to her swept in between his still crying brother and his naive, but ever still gentle adopted mother.

“I am so sorry I doubted you,” Frigga swears, touching the side of Loki’s face with the arm not wrapped around Thor. “That I hurt you so deeply for never telling the truth… I cannot even begin to ask your forgiveness.”

The poison between them dulls as Loki swallows back his own tears, reaching out to take hold of her arm. “You have it regardless.”

Frigga’s eyes well up again as she kisses his cheek and pulls him and Thor closer.

“How much of our conversation were you here for?” Odin inquires behind them, voice low and unreadable. There is a tremble in his hands, however, that betrays him. Loki notes it with another wave of disgust rolling through him.

“I heard enough,” Frigga replies without even looking at her husband. Her eyes are only for her children. Mostly she just can’t seem to take her eyes away from Thor, one hand still studying his face, tracing over his brows and cheeks, running through his shaven head. Her manner suggests the fear that should she look away, even blink, Thor would simply vanish again.

“Frigga…” Odin calls quietly sounding almost pitiful as he watches the three of them share a moment he isn’t part of. “Will you not even look at me?”

There is a another long stretch of silence. Then something in the All-Mother’s expression shifts.

“How could you do this?” Frigga asks, eyes finally moving from Thor to Odin upon his request. Anger the likes of which Loki had never seen brims over as her usually soft, gentle voice changes from warm to bitterly cold. “How could you have kept my son from me?”

“Frigga–”

“All this time,” she says stepping closer, hands balled at her sides while the volume of her voice steadily rises. “All this time you made me believe my first born was dead.”

“By all accounts he was,” Odin tries to reason, regaining his composure enough to double down on his defense. “The son you gave birth to is not the man you see before you now.”

“How could you do this to him?” She asks again, fresh tears falling. “How could you lock him away in this wretched place?”

“Have you nothing more to ask of me?” Odin shifts, looking mildly irritated at the inquiries. “Do you not wish to ask _why_ it was that I had to do this?”

“Oh, I have a question,” Loki cuts in sharply, standing protectively in front of Thor as he challenges the All-Father’s stare with one of his own. “Who is Hela?”

Odin’s face looses what little color it has as something like horror flashes before Frigga’s eyes. She turns sharply to stare between her sons.

“....Hela?”

“You know of her, Mother?” Thor asks.

“Yes,” Frigga breaths, lips thinning as she nods curtly and faces Odin again. “I _knew_ her.”

“Frigga,” Odin interjects, a warning hidden in his tone. “ _Don’t_.”

“She is the Goddess of Death. Odin’s first born,” Frigga says glaring back at her husband before she turns back to Thor’s astonished face with a grim twist of her mouth. “Your sister.”

Loki watches Thor’s face contort from confusion to anger and back to lost all in the span of seconds as he grasps this new information with a slight shake of his head.

“My… my _sister_?” he repeats, looking back up to Odin for more answers.

“She wasn’t your child, though,” says Loki carefully to Frigga, observing the way her shoulders tense at the observation. “Who was her mother?”

“She had none,” Odin answers drawing Loki’s eyes back to him. “Hela is… _different_ , from other Asgardians.”

“She is a demon,” Frigga says lowly, eyes glinting in a dangerous way Loki has never witnessed before. “A plague upon the Kingdom of Asgard. A creature born of blood magic.”

Loki’s mouth falls open in horror, stepping back and staring at Odin in disbelief. “You… you _didn’t_ -“

Odin sighs heavily, hand coming up to rub at his eyes. “I did.”

“You created her from your own blood?” Thor questions eyes flickering between Frigga and Loki’s dark expressions to Odin’s crestfallen face.

“It is a forbidden art,” Loki says softly, suddenly feeling sick to his stomach. “Magic should _never_ be used to create life… Every practitioner follows this rule for a reason.”

“I was arrogant back then,” Odin explains, expression darkened in the first display of true shame he’s demonstrated since his arrival. “Desperate to have an heir, but no wife to produce one. In my arrogance, I believed I could control a child of born from such dark energy. Perhaps even mold them into something better. I thought that the blood of a king, of a god, would be strong enough to temper the malice inside of her.”

“But magic always comes at a price,” Frigga says cooly, hands balled at her sides. “Especially an incantation that defies the basic laws of science and nature. Using the blood of a god made no difference in the matter. All it did was create something even more dangerous than what a sorcerer of mediocre talent could produce.”

Frigga shakes her head, eyes turning from fury to pity. “You made her with your own demise ever present in your heart, and that fear of death fed into her creation.”

“Goddess of Death… He brought life to death itself,” Thor realizes, looking at Loki for confirmation. “And it manifested into her?”

Slowly, gravely the younger prince nods. 

Odin’s eyes shut, head bowing. “It was a folly born of stubborn ambition. That, too, my daughter inherited from me. In the end… Hela was not to be tamed. Her violent appetites grew too much for me to control, so I locked her away.”

“But that wasn’t the only reason, was it?” Loki hisses. “It wasn’t her lust for power and murder that led to her imprisonment.”

“… No,” Odin relents, walking closer towards Thor with a purpose. “It wasn’t.”

Thor’s face is stone cold of emotion as his father faces him and continues.

“Before I banished your sister, she came to me one night. Angry and bitter, unable to accept that I no longer shared her wishes to conquer worlds beyond the Nine Realms. She blamed my change of heart on your mother… And she blamed you for taking the title I stripped her of.”

“In retaliation, she attacked you,” continues Odin with a haunted expresion. “You had somehow wandered into the throneroom when we were arguing. She spotted you before I did. I- I attempted to stop her.”

Odin turns to look at Frigga once more, her eyes spilling over with tears of distraught. “I failed.”

Frigga turns away from him as though she cannot bear the sight of him in this moment, her anguished face buried in her hands.

“She cast a spell so powerful that even I could not break it,” Odin continues. “As punishment for her crimes against myself and my son, I used my life force to seal her away in the realm of the forgotten dead… Hel.”

Odin turns back to Thor and sighs, tired and looking weaker than Loki can ever recall. “I sealed you away with that same force… behind the very barrier I can no longer even keep standing after your brother destroyed the chains that fortified it. I’ve done it for so long that it has has taken a toll on me... That fatigue eventually got the better of me. Forcing me into falling into the Odinsleep before I could stop it…”

Odin looks away from them all, eyes staring blankly at the ground. “Next time I fall… I doubt I shall ever awaken.”

“Why did you not tell me this?” Thor asks, voice horse from tears he refuses to shed as he looks at his father with sheer anguish and revulsion.

“I was afraid,” Odin admits. “Petrified of losing the one thing in my life that made me better than I was before.”

“You should have told me everything,” Frigga snaps, voice cracking with pain and disappointment, hands finally falling from her tear streaked face. “All of it! From the minute she dared to touch my son, you should have told me so that we could work together to save him!”

“There was no saving him!” Odin fires back. “Hela’s powers are a match even for mine. And her vendetta only makes them that much more potent!”

“You promised me when we married that so long as you were my husband, you would strive to be loyal and honest!”

“I _was _,“ Odin insists.__

____

____

“You lied! Knowing that my firstborn lived, you concealed him from me! And then you begged me to hide from my second son the truth of his parentage!”

“I DID IT FOR THE GOOD OF THE REALM AND THIS MONARCHY,” Odin shouts, the room falling silent as he lowers his voice to a furious growl. “I lied, yes, but it was done to protect this family from falling apart.”

“And look how that worked out,” Thor murmurs at last with his face pulled into a grimace, shaking his head in dismay. “You are an old man and a fool… You fell right into my sister’s trap and you never even realized it.”

“What would you have had me do differently, then, _boy_?” Odin bristles, shoulders shaking as he snaps again. “Tell me how you would have handled this were you king instead?!”

“For starters,” Loki interrupts, still firmly standing in front of Thor as he feels the other tense up and move toward Odin. “You could have told the All-Mother everything. You could have told us _all_ the truth for once.”

“And doom our family to ruination and disgrace?”

“Is that _really_ all you care about?” Loki huffs in exasperation. “Even now, you fail to see the results of your short-sighted goals. Even now you reject the notion that I was another stolen relic! The only difference between me and that frozen blue box was that you paraded me about instead of locking me away! That you lied about what I was to the entire kingdom! You took away Thor’s crown and passed it off to me knowing good and well that ruling Jotunheim was my birthright!”

“Your birthright,” Odin says darkly, staring down at Loki with such cold intensity that it slices through any cutting remark the trickster could throw back, “was to _die_ as a child. Cast out onto a broken rock.”

Odin steps forward, tapping his staff down once again, causing Loki to shake and step back into Thor’s back. “Had I left you there, you would not be here to hate me.”

The words sting more than anything Loki was prepared to handle. He had expected his father’s disappointment and belittling for what he had done, but this… This was apathetic and devoid of any feeling. If there was an emotion to be identified underneath such condescension, that Odin sounded almost pleased to put Loki back in his place. It roots him to the spot while the ground quakes beneath him-

“ _Shut up_ ,” Thor rumbles.

Loki feels the chamber around them quake as he realizes what is happening. Whipping his head around, Loki watches as Thor begins to fall into the berserker state, the whites of his eyes turning into a blinding electrical blue as sparks rise over Thor’s skin.

“Thor don’t-“ Loki tries to say before a crack of thunder echoes over head.

Thor’s body begins to levitate over the ground, beyond hearing or thinking as he roars. lightning coming down to strike out against Odin. The All-Father is ready, Gungnir raises and fending off the onslaught as Odin poises himself and snarls up at Thor.

“Stand down, boy! Cease this at once or this time I won’t lock you up!” He fires a blast of energy from his staff and roars as it deflects off of Thor’s next attack. “I have strength left enough to strike you down… Just enough to do what I should have done a thousand years ago!!!”

“NO! Thor stop, please, _listen to me_!” Loki yells, feeling arms come up around him, pulling him away just as another both of lightning cracks down near where he previously stood. Loki tries to pull free, struggling to get back to Thor’s side. “Let me go! Let me _go_!”

“Loki, don’t,” Frigga’s voice rasps in his ear, her arms still wrapped tight around his torso in an impressive display of strength that she rarely demonstrates. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I must go to him! Father will kill him if I don’t!”

“And then Thor will kill _you_!” Frigga sobs out, still holding fast to his struggling, frantic form. “In this state he will kill you, strike you down without realizing until it is too late! Then he’ll never forgive himself for it!”

“You’re wrong,” Loki says, ceasing his struggles to turn in her hold. “Thor will listen to me! He has before! He’ll listen to someone he-”

Loki stops, the chaos and noise around him suddenly sounding distant as he suddenly realizes something, the words of Hela’s curse echoing in his mind.

“ _Until all that is left is a mindless, brainless beast, insatiable in his appetite for chaos and destruction. He will know nothing of kindness, never recall joy or happiness. His will be a life of lonesome suffering… For who can truly come to_ love _something that should never have been born?_ ”

“Loki? Loki!”

“Mother,” Loki says breathlessly, grasping her arms. “You _have_ to let me go.”

“Loki you mustn’t-”

“I know how to break the spell!”

Frigga’s grip softens ever so slightly, her eyes blinking up at Loki startled. “What?”

“The curse Hela placed on him,” Loki explains quickly. “I know how to break it. I’ve heard it in my dreams… I can undo this once and for all. _I can save him! I can bring him back_.”

Frigga stares at him, uncertainty in her gaze as she contemplates his words. Then her eyes fall to where her husband fights her son and shuts them tight, her hands shaking as she lets Loki go.

“… Do it.”

Loki squeezes her arms gratefully before whipping around and walking towards the chaos of two clashing gods. It’s a spectacular sight. Odin with his face set in a determined glare, Gungnir swiping and lashing in an echo of the king’s awesome power. And then there is Thor… A true force of nature in every sense of the word, floating high over his father and attempting to bring down the ceiling over them both.

“Thor!” Loki screams, moving faster now, raising an arm to shield his eyes from another flash of lightning. “Thor stop!”

“Stay out of this, Loki!” Odin grunts, wiping sweat off of his brow with his free hand, the other wielding Gungnir still fending off Thor's onslaught.

“Thor, please, come to your senses!” Loki persists, ignoring the King’s commands, eyes fixed solely upon the man levitating from the floor.

“I _forbid_ you to come any closer!” Odin growls, a threat that would have cowed the younger god into submission not a few months ago. 

“Stand down, Father,” Loki says lowly yet clearly through the booming and the crumbling rocks around them, unmoved by the All-Father’s wrath. “I’m going to break the curse that even you could never break.”

Odin can’t even object as another bolt of lightning hits him. This time, it knocks him back into the wall as Frigga screeches and hurries to his side. Thor’s unseeing eyes follow her movements, hand poised to deliver another blow before Loki leeps in front of his parents.

“Thor, that’s enough!!!”

The god of thunder growls ferally, mouth nashing like some ravenous beast as Loki walks closer, hands up in a placiading manner.

“Brother… do you not know me? Do you not see who I am? It’s me… It’s your little brother… it’s your Loki.”

Something like confusion appears briefly over Thor’s face, his brows knitting together as though trying to recall something. The berserker state wins over, though, and he shakes his head violently as if to fend off the fleeting hesitations like one swats away a fly. Still, Loki moves onward, undeterred.

“Thor, please,” Loki continues, wavering only in voice, not conviction. “You know me, remember? You shared your dreams with me. You saved my life as an infant… You made _love_ to me.”

He dodges a large stone falling from the ceiling above him, the crumpled bits of the mural falling apart as Loki tries to keep himself together.

“You know who I am, just as I know who you are. I know you and I accept you, just as you accepted me.”

Loki pauses just before the still unstable form of his older brother, Thor swaying in the air, making small, anguished, animal like howls.

“It’s alright now, Thor… You can trust me. I care for you.”

Thor’s breathing picks up, then with another roar he charges towards Loki. His arms pull back, then extend towards Loki’s chest, lightning tingling around his frame as he gets closer to the ground. Frigga cries out behind Loki just as he shouts out to Thor.

“ _I love you!_ ”

The words escape him before Thor can land the killing blow, his hand freezing just seconds away from Loki’s heart. 

Loki’s panting now, not from fear of death, but fear of loss… that he might already be too late in saving his brother. The wind around them continues to howl as Loki finds his courage and presses on. “Man. Monster. It matters to me not. I _love_ you, Thor Odinson… And no matter what hardships fate has in store, I will be there by your side. you will never have to face them alone.”

Thor’s eyes still glow, but they are now streaming tears instead of lightning. Loki leans up on his toes, kisses the corner of his mouth and repeats firmly. “I _love_ you.”

There is a frightening moment when the thunder crashes once more, bringing down the last of the mural until all that is left are jagged painted stones, remnants of a history that would never again be forgotten. The winds of the storm slowly begin to dwindle until they disperse all together. When the dust settles, the room falls into a dreaded quiet, broken only by Frigga’s muted shriek and Odin shouting near frantic towards the stairwell.

“Guards! GUARDS!”

For trapped beneath the rubble, lies the two princes of Asgard.

***

When Loki awakens from nothingness, eyes blinking as he takes in his surroundings, he knows immediately where he is. The distinctive, near sterile smell of the infirmary is answer enough. A healer is standing above him, checking his vitals with a polite nod. 

“Welcome back, My Prince. How are you feeling?”

Loki doesn't answer her question, blinking as he sits up. His thoughts are on but a single person.

“Where is he?” he rasps frowning at her nervous expression. When he is given no answer, he repeats himself, louder. “Where is Thor?”

“Your highness, your brother-” 

The young woman doesn't get a chance to finish as Loki glances to his right. He spots Thor in a bed not too far from his own, unmoving and without a single healer attending to him. His body is already moving before he can cobble together a cohesive thought outside of his brother’s name.

“THOR!” Loki cries out, rushing out of the bed and nearly tripping over himself in his haste to reach Thor’s side. “Thor wake up! Please!”

There is no response at first. Not a sigh nor subtle movement to indicate Thor was even alive. But then the bulk of the god of thunder shifts in the bed, and with a tired groan, blue eyes, clearer than they had been in what Loki would guess was centuries, squint open to stare up the tears still trailing down the trickster god’s face.

“… Loki.”

The sound of his own name never sounded any sweeter than coming from Thor’s mouth right in this moment. With a choked sob, the younger prince all but throws himself into his brother’s arms, holding him as tightly as he can without causing further pain. When Thor’s hand starts to run through his hair, Loki responds.

“I am here, brother. _I’m here_.”


	12. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of one tale is the beginning to another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last, we reach the end of this story. And it has been quite the journey trying to get these chapters up before the year is finished, but I'm glad I was able to do it! I would like to sincerely thank everyone who followed and liked this fanfic, and I hope you enjoy the final chapter. This has been really fun for me in spite of a few setbacks.
> 
> Have a Happy New Year everyone. Without further ado, I give you the epilogue.

It has been nine months since Thor was revealed to have been alive since the war on Jotunheim ended. Odin had presented him publicly, omitting only that the curse that had kept Thor from being free all this time was cast by his still unknown daughter. The Kingdom had reacted with shock and amazement, not knowing what to make of such a strange and twisting tale. But then there had been great joy and celebration, for Asgardians are used to accepting the word of their rulers without question. Glad tidings fell upon the returning Crown Prince and his younger brother, who was initially lauded as a hero for breaking the curse. 

Then Loki’s parentage was revealed. While a number of the citizens of Asgard held firm to their prejudices and scorned such a discovery, many found it did not alter their love and admiration for the youngest son of Odin at all. Adopted or not, Jotun or Asir, Loki was still beloved by most of the subjects, an acceptance that had brought some comfort into Loki’s own heart and mind since he learned who he was. Though there was much healing left to do.

It has been nine months since Thor was reintroduced to his people, almost ten since Loki himself uncovered this truth. It has been exactly one year since Loki’s search for answers lead him straight into the west wing and back to Thor. One year since Loki’s supposed coronation came to an abrupt halt which set such fateful events into motion. 

And now instead of Loki’s coronation, they prepare themselves for Thor’s.

“Loki?” Frigga calls from across the hall where the Crown Prince would make his entrance. “Would you come here a moment, please?”

Offering his apologies to one of the interior decorators, Loki approaches the Queen, brow quirked. “Is something the matter, Mother?”

“I’m in great need of a second opinion. Look there,” Frigga points up to the banners dangling overhead. “What do you think?”

Loki takes in the vibrant reds and silver accents a moment, briefly forgetting they aren’t meant to be green and gold instead. At length he hums, frowning. “Well… It’s not quite right, I’m afraid.” 

Frigga pauses, puzzled. “How so? Are they not long enough, do you think?”

“No… It’s just those colors. There’s something off about them.”

The youngest prince steps closer towards the banners before he waves hand. A gust of wind billows past them, making them ripple, the dull, dark red becoming a tone more vibrant and bold, the silver shimmering even brighter where the sunlight hits it.

Loki steps back again and nods approvingly. “How about now?”

Frigga gasps, radiating in pure delight as she takes in the changes. She claps her hands together as she gushes. “It’s wonderful! It’s exactly what your brother deserves.”

“And nothing less,” Loki agrees with a genuine smile.

Frigga smiles back, and takes Loki by the arm. “Come walk with me. I believe we both could do with some fresh air. “

Following his mother, Loki chats idly with her about the preparations, occasionally remarking upon the food and wine quality. He also offers advice for possible entertainment, taking Frigga’s light scolding as he tosses the idea of maybe lightening the mood of the banquet with a few harmless pranks.

“Do not put snakes in the goblets,” Frigga chides.

“It’s just a bit of fun,” Loki reasons before relenting under her stern glance. “Oh, very well then…”

“And no turning the minstrels into frogs.”

“… I hadn’t considered that one, but actually- ow!” Loki rubs his arm where Frigga pinched it before relenting. “Yes, yes, I promise. No pranks during the banquet.”

“And none before or after,” Frigga adds before Loki could find a loophole.

“No fear of either,” says the prince with a slight shrug. “I’ll be preoccupied on both occasions,”

“Yes,” says Frigga stopping them at one of the balconies with a knowing look. “You and Thor have been ‘occupying’ each other’s time quite a bit.”

Loki’s face heats, before he bites his lip. “About that… We never actually discussed what happened in the dungeons the day you found us.”

“No. We did not…”

There's a pause, then Loki forces himself to ask. “So. Why haven’t you asked?”

Frigga sighs, a hand coming to rest upon the stone ledge of the balcony as she gazes out at the gardens below. “After everything that had happened… All the pain our family went through, I thought it best to wait until you and Thor were ready to speak about it yourselves. It is between yourself and your brother. And I have asked your father not to interfere any further on the matter.”

Loki looks away unhappily, “He must despise us…”

“He doesn’t,” Frigga reassures, taking a moment to watch Loki closely before she inquires. “Do you still detest him so?”

“I don’t… _detest_ him, per say,” Loki says carefully, hands clenching and unclenching again as he admits, “He is and always will be my father. But I resent what he put our family through. All the things he concealed.”

“And… is it the same with me?” Frigga asks, eyes flickering away, unable to look upon her youngest son without remorse.

Loki ponders, but finds that the answer comes quicker than he thought.

“No… I already told you I forgave you in the dungeons, Mother.” He takes in a deep breath before exhaling. “But I cannot deny that I am still angry.”

“As you should be,” comes Frigga’s quiet reply. “I am angry as well. Angry at myself for not following my own instincts. For not telling you the truth of your birth sooner.”

She pauses, seemingly unable to continue until Loki lays a reassuring hand on her shoulder and she relaxes. “And so far as your anger with your father, that I share as well. I cannot pretend to deny how heartbroken I am for all that these secrets have done to us. But…”

She trails off with a small, melancholy smile.

“I still love him. I may not trust him as I once did, nor will I forgive him for keeping me from my first born. But nevertheless, I love him.”

“You’re saying we should move on and forget it?” Loki asks, trying to keep the bitterness from his tone.

“Never,” Frigga says quickly. “I do not ask you to forget. I accept your anger and I shall work harder as your mother to earn back your trust, even if there’s little to save. But I wish for you to try and find peace with your father as well.”

Loki looks away unhappily. “He needs to be held just as accountable as you feel you should be. More, if we’re being honest now.” 

Frigga shakes her head sadly. “He is already paying a heavy price for his sins, Loki. He doesn’t have much time left.”

On that Loki does not argue, face bowed in resignation. He licks his lips, turning his head up and wondering, “… How do you know he doesn’t hate Thor and me? Truly.”

“Because you are his sons,” Frigga says simply, firmly. “He loves you both, Loki. He may not always show it or say it enough, but he could never hate you.”

“And… Are you not-?” Loki stops, looking away from her for the briefest second. “You’re not angry with us, too?”

Frigga glances back to him. “Whatever for, dearest?”

Loki swallows, risking a gaze up at her. “Of Thor and me. That we have a certain regard for one another… that we are _involved_?”

Frigga blinks, then her face lightens at once, a small smile appearing as she answers, “Oh Loki… Anyone with eyes that work can see that you and Thor belong together. Why should I be angry?”

“He is my brother,” Loki says quietly, though unapologetic. “Not in blood, certainly, but in heart and mind we are family.”

The All-Mother regards him with the softest, most endearing expression before she replies. “The night you came to inquire about dream sharing… You asked me about those who are bonded without knowing one another. Do you recall what it was I told you?”

“That very powerful sorcerers could form a bond without ever realizing it…”

“Yes, but that’s not the case for you.”

Loki shakes his head. “Thor possesses magical ability-“

“In a limited capacity,” Frigga says frankly. “Thor is many things, but a sorcerer is not among his titles. What you have with him is something else entirely.”

Something warm fills him from within as Frigga puts a name to it.

“You are _soulmates_ in every sense of the word, Loki. Your bond with Thor is one no one can break, even if they wished it. It is not for anyone to judge the path that fate has designed for you both.”

She places a hand upon Loki’s cheek, thumb caressing it, continuing, “You were destined to find Thor. You were destined to discover what it was that had taken hold of him, and in the end, it was you who was destined to do what even the All-Father could not. To break the curse Hela placed upon Thor. To bind yourself to him, as he has to you, forever more.”

Loki shudders out a sigh, reaching to grasp his mother’s hand in his own, squeezing it. “…Thank you, Mother.”

A light cough catches both of their attention. Thor stands in the archway with a slight wave, “I was told I’d find you two here. May I borrow Loki from you, Mother?”

Loki makes to move towards the other man, before remembering his hands still being held in Frigga’s. He turns to cast a questioning look to his mother.

“Go,” Frigga winks, releasing Loki. “I shall see you both tonight. But don’t stay up late after dinner. Thor has a big day tomorrow.”

“We make no promises,” Thor jokes, grinning as Loki sputters and shushes him.

Frigga folds her arms and smiles warmly, watching her youngest son hurry to her eldest’s side, the two falling into step as they leave the balcony with hands joined.

“So how did you know where to find us?” Loki asks as they descend the twisting steps of the palace and pass into the garden at a leisurely pace, enjoying the coolness of an almost autumn evening, the sun drifting lower in the sky.

“Heimdall,” Thor says simply. “I visited him today after I spent a few hours with the Warriors Three. They all send their regards.”

Loki hums, “You’ve been in their company frequently these last few weeks.”

“Indeed,” Thor says with a grin. “It’s been good to be in the company of my friends again. Heimdall is the same as ever, just with a few grey hairs. And Volstagg,” Thor grins in excitement, “his children are fully grown now! And Hogun tells me Vanaheim’s even more prosperous than last I’ve seen it.”

“It is,” Loki affirms. “I went with Mother when she last visited with lady Freya. It’s very beautiful.”

Thor nods, then falls quiet suddenly, expression turning from merriment to almost comically casual. “I have also been getting to know Fandral a little better…”

Knowing immediately where this is headed, Loki hides his chuckle under a cough. “Oh?”

“He thinks very highly of your skills in battle,” Thor says. Then grumbles. “He also made several passing remarks of your beauty.”

“Oh _please_ ,” Loki laughs rolling his eyes. “Don’t tell me you were jealous?”

“I wasn’t,” Thor scoffs. “But I might have warned him to be more mindful of his tone.”

Loki laughs, then changes the subject. “You were training again, I see.”

“A little,” Thor nods, then frowns and glances over. “How did you know?”

Loki lifts a finger and pokes a rather prominent bruise above his right eye. “This.”

“Ow! Have a care, will you?”

The younger god smirks, dropping his hand and prying. “And which one of our bravest warriors had the honor of bestowing the Crown Prince of Asgard with such a rare gift?”

Thor doesn’t answer right away, turning away so that Loki can only see his ears turning red. Then he mumbles beneath his breath. “Lady Sif.”

This time, Loki doubles over with laughter as his brother glares back around at him. 

“It’s not that funny,” Thor grumbles. 

“You’ll forgive me,” breaths Loki after the worst of his fit has died down, wiping his eyes. “But no matter how many times she bests boastful warriors who think a woman is no match for them, seeing her do so again is indeed hilarious.”

“I had no doubt that she was strong!” Thor protests, adding childishly. “I just… thought I was stronger.”

“They always do,” Loki says.

Thor huffs, rolling his shoulders, “She caught me off guard this time, brother. It will not happen again.”

“Oh, so you mean to give me an encore?” Loki asks innocently. “Why it isn’t even my name day yet.”

“ _Stop_ ,” Thor holds up a finger in warning, the threat not quite strong enough to hide the smile in his eyes. “I just might punish you for such mischief.”

“Sounds promising,” Loki flirts, before patting Thor’s arm condescendingly. “But alas you won’t. You’re too soft.”

“Only for you,” Thor counters, a sappy smile on his face.

“And this is why I am your advisor and not your king,” Loki scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Only fools can rule Asgard.”

“You’re calling Father a fool now?” Thor nudges teasingly.

“The greatest of them all, save perhaps one,” Loki grins, nudging him back, harder.

Thor laughs, arm casually coming around Loki’s waist, pulling him to his side. But the lightness drops as Loki thinks of their father, and his mind finds darker thoughts to dwell on.

“Loki?” Thor asks, sensing the change in his mood. “What is it?”

“Nothing shall ever be what it was before,” Loki laments, words bitter though Thor’s kisses on his neck do just enough to sooth.

“No,” agrees Thor. “But we cannot go back in time and change what had already been done.”

“But our father… What he did to you,” Loki’s voice cracks recalling that the arms now holding him were not long ago shackled and bond. He feels anger rise in him, a wave of protectiveness seizing. “Were it not for you… and even mother, I don’t know if I could stand to speak to him anymore.”

“Brother, look at me.”

Loki follows Thor’s hands as they tilt his head up to meet his gaze.

“I am done living in the past, Loki. It is true that what Father did to me… To our entire family is unconscionable. But it is over. His time on this plane is nearing its end. I may never fully forgive him for what was done to me, but I refuse to wallow any longer in vengeance and spite.” 

Thor’s tone grows sober. “That’s what Hela did. She hated Odin, hated Mother, hated _me_. And in the end, it accomplished nothing… It does _nothing_ but destroy you. It rots you away on the inside until all that’s left in your stead is a monster.”

“She will be back, Thor,” Loki says, eyes downcast as he thinks to that not so distant future and despairs. “I can feel it. Father is weak from using his life force to contain her and you at the same time. Hela knows this and once he is gone, she will return to finish what she started… and there is nothing we can do to stop it.”

“I know,” says Thor lightly, arms encircling his brother tight. “There will come a day when my sister and I shall meet once more.”

A kiss upon Loki’s head and a nuzzle to his scalp cause the younger god to shut his eyes as Thor says, “But when that time does come, we shall face her. Together.”

Loki allows this moment to wash over him. Allows Thor the chance to feel optimistic enough for the both of them. He tempers his own pessimism and turns around to bestow a soft kiss upon Thor’s mouth. When he pulls away, it’s not far, his lips moving against Thor’s cheek.

“Together,” he murmurs choosing to believe in Thor instead of succumbing to whatever twisted future fate has in store for them. “Just as it was always meant to be.”

They contemplate such a future in silence, neither wishing to break the reverie of their present. Eventually Loki does, stepping back from their embrace.

“Promise me one thing, Brother mine.”

“Anything,” Thor says, hands holding strong to Loki’s.

Loki takes in a breath, eyes alight with hopeful conviction as he stares up at Thor. “Never doubt that I love you.”

The sentiment makes Thor’s face break into a brilliant smile as he holds Loki to him again, the last rays of the sun fading out beyond Asgard's horizon.

“And I you.”

 

***

In the realm of the dead, there is but one living soul who presides over them all. Some days she amuses herself by tormenting those who have been damned to this place of darkness. Others she paces back and forth in her garden of wilted shrubs and fallen trees, vexed and tired of being confined to this kingdom of decay. 

And then there are days such as this, where Hela sits upon her false throne of iron and rust, and waits. She conjures a spell allowing her to peek into the realm of her father, Odin. Asgard. The realm eternal. The kingdom that was meant to be hers, before the old fool cast her out and stripped her of her birthright. Today, her eyes are fixed on the half-bred spawn of the All-Father. His newly freed son, the catalyst for her banishment. Thor.

“Oh, would you look at that,” she drawls, watching as Thor speaks sweetly to his lovely frost giant runt. She scrunches up her nose and sniffs. “It seems my _beloved_ little brother broke free of my curse and found _true love_.”

With a flick of her hand, Hela summons a spear, standing from her seat and throwing it through the smoky holograph, causing the image of the happy couple to dissipate.

“Disgusting.”

The dreary howls of the winds of Hel echoe around the Goddess of Death in her desolate, miserable excuse for a throne room. She sniffs and walks over to the center of the hall to produce another window into the realm eternal. Within this image, she beholds the King of Asgard, older, weaker than before. Then she laughs, long and loud with a triumphant gleam in her luminous green eyes.

“Well, well, well,” sniggers the dark haired goddess, gleefully. “Looks like Odin’s time as a ruler is almost is coming its end. Took him long enough.”

A casual flick of her wrist vanishes the spell, and Odin’s aging image with it.

“Enjoy your freedom while it lasts, baby brother,” sneers Hela sitting back upon the throne with a smirk. “This quaint little fairytale of yours is _far_ from finished.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And you all thought I was done with the cliffhangers, didn't you? Maybe someday if I have the time and inspiration I will write the sequel, but for the present, I wish you all a wonderful New Year. Perhaps I will see you lovely readers again if there is another Thorki Big Bang in 2019!
> 
> Take care!

**Author's Note:**

> Please stay tuned for the next installment. And if you liked this chapter, please let me know what you think in the comments below. I'd love to hear your feedback :)


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